Physics-Based Animation

Chongyao Zhao, Jinkeng Lin, Tianyu Wang, Hujun Bao, Jin Huang

Piecewise linear inextensible Cosserat rods are usually represented by Cartesian coordinates of vertices and quaternions on the segments. Such representations use excessive degrees of freedom (DOFs), and need many additional constraints, which causes unnecessary numerical difficulties and computational burden for simulation. We propose a simple yet compact representation that exactly matches the intrinsic DOFs and naturally satisfies all such constraints. Specifically, viewing a rod as a chain of rigid segments, we encode its shape as the Cartesian coordinates of its root vertex, and use axis-angle representation for the material frame on each segment. Under our representation, the Hessian of the implicit timestepping has special non-zero patterns. Exploiting such specialties, we can solve the associated linear equations in nearly linear complexity. Furthermore, we carefully designed a preconditioner, which is proved to be always symmetric positive-definite and accelerates the PCG solver in one or two orders of magnitude compared with the widely used block-diagonal one. Compared with other technical choices including Super-Helices, a specially designed compact representation for inextensible Cosserat rods, our method achieves better performance and stability, and can simulate an inextensible Cosserat rod with hundreds of vertices and tens of collisions in real time under relatively large time steps.

Efficient and Stable Simulation of Inextensible Cosserat Rods by a Compact Representation

Simon Duenser, Bernhard Thomaszewski, Roi Poranne, Stelian Coros

Many flexible structures are characterized by a small number of compliant
modes, i.e., large deformation paths that can be traversed with little mechanical effort, whereas resistance to other deformations is much stiffer. Predicting the compliant modes for a given flexible structure, however, is challenging. While linear eigenmodes capture the small-deformation behavior, they quickly divert into states of unrealistically high energy for larger displacements. Moreover, they are inherently unable to predict nonlinear phenomena such as buckling, stiffening, multistability, and contact. To address this limitation, we propose Nonlinear Compliant Modes—a physically-principled extension of linear eigenmodes for large-deformation analysis. Instead of constraining the entire structure to deform along a given eigenmode, our method only prescribes the projection of the system’s state onto the linear mode while all other degrees of freedom follow through energy minimization. We evaluate the potential of our method on a diverse set of flexible structures, ranging from compliant mechanisms to topology-optimized joints and structured materials. As validated through experiments on physical prototypes, our method correctly predicts a broad range of nonlinear effects that linear eigenanalysis fails to capture.

Nonlinear Compliant Modes for Large-Deformation Analysis of Flexible
Structures

Nicolas Rosset, Guillaume Cordonnier, Regis Duvigneau, Adrien Bousseau

The design of car shapes requires a delicate balance between aesthetic and performance. While fluid simulation provides the means to evaluate the aerodynamic performance of a given shape, its computational cost hinders its usage during the early explorative phases of design, when aesthetic is decided upon. We present an interactive system to assist designers in creating aerodynamic car profiles. Our system relies on a neural surrogate model to predict fluid flow around car shapes, providing fluid visualization and shape optimization feedback to designers as soon as they sketch a car profile. Compared to prior work that focused on time-averaged fluid flows, we describe how to train our model on instantaneous, synchronized observations extracted from multiple pre-computed simulations, such that we can visualize and optimize for dynamic flow features, such as vortices. Furthermore, we architectured our model to support gradient-based shape optimization within a learned latent space of car profiles. In addition to regularizing the optimization process, this latent space and an associated encoder-decoder allows us to input and output car profiles in a bitmap form, without any explicit parameterization of the car boundary. Finally, we
designed our model to support pointwise queries of fluid properties around car shapes, allowing us to adapt computational cost to application needs. As an illustration, we only query our model along streamlines for flow visualization, we query it in the vicinity of the car for drag optimization, and we query it behind the car for vortex attenuation.

Interactive design of 2D car profiles with aerodynamic feedback

Tianxing Li, Rui Shi, Takashi Kanai

This paper presents a novel learning-based clothing deformation method to generate rich and reasonable detailed deformations for garments worn by bodies of various shapes in various animations. In contrast to existing learning-based methods, which require numerous trained models for different garment topologies or poses and are unable to easily realize rich details, we use a unified framework to produce high fidelity deformations efficiently and easily. To address the challenging issue of predicting deformations influenced by multi-source attributes, we propose three strategies from novel perspectives. Specifically, we first found that the fit between the garment and the body has an important impact on the degree of folds. We then designed an attribute parser to generate detail-aware encodings and infused them into the graph neural network, therefore enhancing the discrimination of details under diverse attributes. Furthermore, to achieve better convergence and avoid overly smooth deformations, we proposed output reconstruction to mitigate the complexity of the learning task. Experiment results show that our proposed deformation method achieves better performance over existing methods in terms of generalization ability and quality of details.

Detail-aware Deep Clothing Animations Infused with Multi-source Attributes

Carlos Rodriguez-Pardo, Melania Prieto-Martin, Dan Casas, Elena Garces

We propose a method to estimate the mechanical parameters of fabrics using a casual capture setup with a depth camera. Our approach enables to create mechanically-correct digital representations of real-world textile materials, which is a fundamental step for many interactive design and engineering applications. As opposed to existing capture methods, which typically require expensive setups, video sequences, or manual intervention, our solution can capture at scale, is agnostic to the optical appearance of the textile, and facilitates fabric arrangement by non-expert operators. To this end, we propose a sim-to-real strategy to train a learning-based framework that can take as input one or multiple images and outputs a full set of mechanical parameters. Thanks to carefully designed data augmentation and transfer learning protocols, our solution generalizes to real images despite being trained only on synthetic data, hence successfully closing the sim-to-real loop.Key in our work is to demonstrate that evaluating the regression accuracy based on the similarity at parameter space leads to an inaccurate distances that do not match the human perception. To overcome this, we propose a novel metric for fabric drape similarity that operates on the image domain instead on the parameter space, allowing us to evaluate our estimation within the context of a similarity rank. We show that out metric correlates with human judgments about the perception of drape similarity, and that our model predictions produce perceptually accurate results compared to the ground truth parameters.

How Will It Drape? Capturing Fabric Mechanics from Depth Images

Katja Wolff, Philipp Herholz, Verena Ziegler, Frauke Link, Nico Brügel, Olga Sorkine-Hornung

The standardized sizes used in the garment industry do not cover the range of individual differences in body shape for most people, leading to ill-fitting clothes, high return rates and overproduction. Recent research efforts in both industry and academia therefore focus on virtual try-on and on-demand fabrication of individually fitting garments. We propose an interactive design tool for creating custom-fit garments based on 3D body scans of the intended wearer. Our method explicitly incorporates transitions between various body poses to ensure a better fit and freedom of movement. The core of our method focuses on tools to create a 3D garment shape directly on an avatar without an underlying sewing pattern, and on the adjustment of that garment’s rest shape while interpolating and moving through the different input poses. We alternate between cloth simulation and rest shape adjustment based on stretch to achieve the final shape of the garment. At any step in the real-time process, we allow for interactive changes to the garment. Once the garment shape is finalized for production, established techniques can be used to parameterize it into a 2D sewing pattern or transform it into a knitting pattern.

Designing Personalized Garments with Body Movement

• Differentiable Depth for Real2Sim Calibration of Soft Body Simulations
• How Will it Drape? Capturing Fabric Mechanics from Depth Images
• Physics-Informed Neural Corrector for Deformation-based Fluid Control
• An Optimization-based SPH Solver for Simulation of Hyperelastic Solids
• Monolithic Friction and Contact Handling for Rigid Bodies and Fluids using SPH
• Detail-Aware Deep Clothing Animations Infused with Multi-Source Attributes
• Designing Personalized Garments with Body Movement
• Interactive Design of 2D Car Profiles with Aerodynamic Feedback

Bo Ren, Xiaohan Ye, Zherong Pan, Taiyuan Zhang

We propose a learning-based controller for high-dimensional dynamic systems with coupled fluid and solid objects. The dynamic behaviors of such systems can vary across different simulators and the control tasks subject to changing requirements from users. Our controller features high versatility and can adapt to changing dynamic behaviors and multiple tasks without re-training, which is achieved by combining two training strategies. We use meta-reinforcement learning to inform the controller of changing
simulation parameters. We further design a novel task representation, which allows the controller to adapt to continually changing tasks via hindsight experience replay. We highlight the robustness and generality of our controller on a row of dynamic-rich tasks including scooping up solid balls from a water pool, in-air ball acrobatics using fluid spouts, and zero-shot transferring to unseen simulators and constitutive models. In all the scenarios, our controller consistently outperforms the plain multi-task reinforcement learning baseline.

Versatile Control of Fluid-Directed Solid Objects Using Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

Joshua Aurand, Raphaël Oritz, Sylvia Nauer, Vinicius Azevedo

Artistically controlling fluids has always been a challenging task. Recently, volumetric Neural Style Transfer (NST) techniques have been used to artistically manipulate smoke simulation data with 2D images. In this work, we revisit previous volumetric NST techniques for smoke, proposing a suite of upgrades that enable stylizations that are significantly faster, simpler, more controllable and less prone to artifacts. Moreover, the energy minimization solved by previous methods is camera dependent. To avoid that, a computationally expensive iterative optimization performed for multiple views sampled around the original simulation is needed, which can take up to several minutes per frame. We propose a simple feed-forward neural network architecture that is able to infer view-independent stylizations that are three orders of the magnitude faster than its optimization-based counterpart.

Efficient Neural Style Transfer For Volumetric Simulations

Haoyu Hu, Xinyu Yi, Hao Zhang, Jun-Hai Yong, Feng Xu

Single view-based reconstruction of hand-object interaction is challenging due to the severe observation missing caused by occlusions. This paper proposes a physics-based method to better solve the ambiguities in the reconstruction. It first proposes a force-based dynamic model of the in-hand object, which not only recovers the unobserved contacts but also solves for plausible contact forces. Next, a confidence-based slide prevention scheme is proposed, which combines both the kinematic confidences and the contact forces to jointly model static and sliding contact motion. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that the proposed technique reconstructs both physically plausible and more accurate hand-object interaction and estimates plausible contact forces in real-time with a single RGBD sensor.

Physical Interaction: Reconstructing Hand-object Interactions with Physics