Physics-Based Animation

Jan Bender, Kenny Erleben, Jeff Trinkle, Erwin Coumans

Interactive rigid body simulation is an important part of many modern computer tools. No authoring tool nor a game engine can do without. The high performance computer tools open up new possibilities for changing how designers, engineers, modelers and animators work with their design problems.

This paper is a self contained state-of-the-art report on the physics, the models, the numerical methods and the algorithms used in interactive rigid body simulation all of which has evolved and matured over the past 20 years. The paper covers applications and the usage of interactive rigid body simulation.

Besides the mathematical and theoretical details that this paper communicates in a pedagogical manner the paper surveys common practice and reflects on applications of interactive rigid body simulation. The grand merger of interactive and off-line simulation methods is imminent, multi-core is everyman’s property. These observations pose future challenges for research which we reflect on. In perspective several avenues for possible future work is touched upon such as more descriptive models and contact point generation problems. This paper is not only a stake in the sand on what has been done, it also seeks to give newcomers practical hands on advices and reflections that can give experienced researchers afterthought for the future.

Interactive Simulation of Rigid Body Dynamics in Computer Graphics

Haimasree Bhattacharya, Michael Nielsen, Robert Bridson

Fluid control methods often require surface velocities interpolated throughout the interior of a shape to use the velocity as a feedback force or as a boundary condition. Prior methods for interpolation in computer graphics — velocity extrapolation in the normal direction and potential flow — suffer from a common problem. They fail to capture the rotational components of the velocity field, although extrapolation in the normal direction does consider the tangential component. We address this problem by casting the interpolation as a steady state Stokes flow. This type of flow captures the rotational components and is suitable for controlling liquid animations where tangential motion is pronounced, such as in a breaking wave.

Steady state Stokes flow interpolation for fluid control

There are some Eurographics 2012 papers on physics-based animation topics…

• Explicit Mesh Surfaces for Particle Based Fluids
• Super-Clothoids
• Data-Driven Estimation of Cloth Simulation Models
• Computational Design of Rubber Balloons

STAR reports:

• Interactive Simulation of Rigid Body Dynamics in Computer Graphics

Jihun Yu, Chris Wojtan, Greg Turk, Chee Yap

We introduce the idea of using an explicit triangle mesh to track the air/fluid interface in a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) simulator. Once an initial surface mesh is created, this mesh is carried forward in time using nearby particle velocities to advect the mesh vertices. The mesh connectivity remains mostly unchanged across time-steps; it is only modified locally for topology change events or for the improvement of triangle quality. In order to ensure that the surface mesh does not diverge from the underlying particle simulation, we periodically project the mesh surface onto an implicit surface defined by the physics simulation. The mesh surface gives us several advantages over previous SPH surface tracking techniques. We demonstrate a new method for surface tension calculations that clearly outperforms the state of the art in SPH surface tension for computer graphics. We also demonstrate a method for tracking detailed surface information (like colors) that is less susceptible to numerical diffusion than competing techniques. Finally, our temporally-coherent surface mesh allows us to simulate high-resolution surface wave dynamics without being limited by the particle resolution of the SPH simulation.

Explicit Mesh Surfaces for Particle Based Fluids

Landon Boyd, Robert Bridson

Physically-based liquid animations often ignore the influence of air, giving up interesting behaviour. We present a new method which treats both
air and liquid as incompressible, more accurately reproducing the reality observed at scales relevant to computer animation. The Fluid Implicit Particle (FLIP) method, already shown to effectively simulate incompressible fluids with low numerical dissipation, is extended to two-phase flow by associating a phase bit with each particle. The liquid surface is reproduced at each time step from the particle positions, which are adjusted to prevent mixing near the surface and to allow for accurate surface tension. The liquid surface is adjusted around small-scale features so they are represented in the grid-based pressure projection, while separate, loosely coupled velocity fields reduce unwanted influence between the phases. The resulting scheme is easy to implement, requires little parameter tuning and is shown to reproduce lively two-phase fluid phenomena.

Multi-FLIP for Energetic Two-Phase Fluid Simulation

Efficient Computational Methods for Phyically-Based Simulation – Bernhard Thomaszewski, Tuebingen

Practical Methods for Simulation of Compressible Flow and Structure Interactions – Nipun Kwatra, Stanford

Coupled Simulation of Deformable Solids, Rigid Bodies, and Fluids – Craig Schroeder, Stanford

Strand-Based Musculotendon Simulation of the Hand – Shinjiro Sueda, UBC

Eulerian Geometric Discretizations of Manifolds and Dynamics – Patrick Mullen, Caltech

Efficient, Scalable Traffic and Compressible Fluid Simulations using Hyperbolic Models – Jason Sewall, UNC

Are there other recent ones I’m missing? Let me know.

Gilles Daviet, Florence Bertails-Descoubes, Laurence Boissieux

Dry friction between hair fibers plays a major role in the collective hair dynamic behavior as it accounts for typical nonsmooth features such as stick-slip instabilities. However, due the challenges posed by the modeling of nonsmooth friction, previous mechanical models for hair either neglect friction or use an approximate smooth friction model, thus losing important visual features. In this paper we present a new generic robust solver for capturing Coulomb friction in large assemblies of tightly packed fibers such as hair. Our method is based on an iterative algorithm where each single contact problem is efficiently and robustly solved by introducing a hybrid strategy that combines a new zero-finding formulation of (exact) Coulomb friction together with an analytical solver as a fail-safe. Our global solver turns out to be very robust and highly scalable as it can handle up to a few thousand densely packed fibers subject to tens of thousands frictional contacts at a reasonable computational cost. It can be conveniently combined to any fiber model with various rest shapes, from smooth to curly. Our results, visually validated against real hair motions, depict typical hair collective effects and greatly enhance the realism of standard hair simulators.

A Hybrid Iterative Solver for Robustly Capturing Coulomb Friction in Hair Dynamics

Barbara Solenthaler, Peter Bucher, Nuttapong Chentanez, Matthias Muller, Markus Gross

We present an efficient method that uses particles to solve the 2D shallow water equations. These equations describe the dynamics of a body of water represented by a height field. Instead of storing the surface heights using uniform grid cells, we discretize the fluid with 2D SPH particles and compute the height according to the density at each particle location. The particle discretization offers the benefits that it simplifies the use of sparsely filled domains and arbitrary boundary geometry. Our solver can handle terrain slopes and supports two-way coupling of the particle-based height field with rigid objects. An improved surface definition is presented that reduces visible bumps related to the underlying particle representation. It furthermore smoothes areas with separating particles to achieve better rendering results. Both the physics and the rendering are implemented on modern GPUs resulting in interactive performances in all our presented examples.

SPH Based Shallow Water Simulation

Matthias Muller, Nuttapong Chentanez

We present a method to enhance the realism of animated characters by adding physically based secondary motion to deformable parts such as cloth, skin or hair. To this end, we extend the oriented particles approach to incorporate animation information. In addition, we introduce techniques to increase the stability of the original method in order to make it suitable for the fast and sudden motions that typically occur in computer games. We also propose a method for the semi-automatic creation of particle representations from arbitrary visual meshes. This way, our technique allows us to simulate complex geometry such as hair, thick cloth with ornaments and multi-layered clothing, all interacting with each other and the animated character.

Adding Physics to Characters Using Oriented Particles