Physics-Based Animation

The SIGGRAPH courses for 2007 are posted online. The two that seem relevant to physics-based animation are:

Fluid Simulation

Strands and Hair: Modeling, Animation and Rendering

“The Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA) is the premier forum for innovations in the software and technology of computer animation. This annual event brings together researchers and practitioners working on all aspects of time-based phenomena. The intimate size, the single track program , and comfortable surroundings make this symposium an ideal opportunity to exchange research results and implementation experiences, and to witness some of the best research in computer animation.”
It’s collocated with SIGGRAPH this year, August 3-4, in San Diego.

SCA 2007

“Visual quality, low computational cost, and numerical stability are foremost goals in computer animation. An important ingredient in achieving these goals is the conservation of fundamental motion invariants. For example, rigid and deformable body simulation benefits greatly from the conservation of linear and angular momenta. In the case of fluids, however, none of the current techniques focuses on conserving invariants, and consequently, often introduce a visually disturbing numerical diffusion of vorticity. Just as important visually is the resolution of complex simulation domains. Doing so with regular (even if adaptive) grid techniques can be computationally delicate. In this article, we propose a novel technique for the simulation of fluid flows. It is designed to respect the defining differential properties, that is, the conservation of circulation along arbitrary loops as they are transported by the flow. Consequently, our method offers several new and desirable properties: Arbitrary simplicial meshes (triangles in 2D, tetrahedra in 3D) can be used to define the fluid domain; the computations involved in the update procedure are efficient due to discrete operators with small support; and it preserves discrete circulation, avoiding numerical diffusion of vorticity.”

Stable, Circulation-Preserving Simplicial Fluids

Having a strong personal interest in physics-based animation, I thought it would be interesting to start a blog that aids in collecting and disseminating information related to physics-based animation, taking inspiration from the GPGPU site. Since I’m starting this in March of 2007, I’m not going to bother collecting papers preceding, say, January 2007, but if you have any new papers, conferences, books or courses you would like to see noted here, please consider leaving a comment on the About page.