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

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

SPH Based Shallow Water Simulation

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

VRIPhys 2011 papers

The program for VRIPHYS 2011 is up, which includes the following physics-related papers:

Adding Physics to Characters Using Oriented Particles

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

Sketch-Based Dynamic Illustration of Fluid Systems

Bo Zhu, Michiaki Iwata, Ryo Haraguchi, Takashi Ashahara, Nobukuyuki Umetani, Takeo Igarashi, Kazuo Nakazawa

This paper presents a lightweight sketching system that enables interactive illustration of complex fluid systems. Users can sketch on a 2.5-dimensional (2.5D) canvas to design the shapes and connections of a fluid circuit. These input sketches are automatically analyzed and abstracted into a hydraulic graph, and a new hybrid fluid model is used in the background to enhance the illustrations. The system provides rich simple operations for users to edit the fluid system incrementally, and the new internal flow patterns can be simulated in real time. Our system is used to illustrate various fluid systems in medicine, biology, and engineering. We asked professional medical doctors to try our system and obtained positive feedback from them.

Sketch-Based Dynamic Illustration of Fluid Systems

Pattern Guided Smoke Animation with Lagrangian Coherent Structure

Zhi Yuan, Fan Chen, Ye Zhao

Fluid animation practitioners face great challenges from the complexity of flow dynamics and the high cost of numerical simulation. A major hindrance is the uncertainty of fluid behavior after simulation resolution increases and extra turbulent effects are added. In this paper, we propose to regulate fluid animations with predesigned flow patterns. Animators can design their desired fluid behavior with fast, low-cost simulations. Flow patterns are then extracted from the results by the Lagrangian Coherent Structure (LCS) that represents major flow skeleton. Therefore, the final high-quality animation is confined towards the designed behavior by applying the patterns to drive high-resolution and turbulent simulations. The pattern regulation is easily computed and achieves controllable variance in the output. The method makes it easy to design special fluid effects, which increases the usability and scalability of various advanced fluid modeling technologies.

Pattern Guided Smoke Animation with Lagrangian Coherent Structure

 

VolCCD: Fast Continuous Collision Culling Between Deforming Volume Meshes

Min Tang, Dinesh Manocha, Sung-Eui Yoon, Peng Du, Jae-Pil Heo, Ruofeng Tong

We present a novel culling algorithm to perform fast and robust continuous collision detection between deforming volume meshes. This includes a continuous separating axis test that can conservatively check whether two volume meshes overlap during a given time interval. Moreover, we present efficient methods to eliminate redundant elementary tests between the features (e.g., vertices, edges, and faces) of volume elements (e.g., tetrahedra). Our approach is applicable to various deforming meshes, including those with changing topologies, and efficiently computes the first time of contact. We are able to perform inter-object and intra-object collision queries in models represented with tens of thousands of volume elements at interactive rates on a single CPU core. Moreover, we observe more than an order of magnitude performance improvement over prior methods.

VolCCD: Fast Continuous Collision Culling Between Deforming Volume Meshes

Hybrid Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Karthik Raveendran, Chris Wojtan, Greg Turk

We present a new algorithm for enforcing incompressibility for Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) by preserving uniform density across the domain. We propose a hybrid method that uses a Poisson solve on a coarse grid to enforce a divergence free velocity field, followed by a local density correction of the particles. This avoids typical grid artifacts and maintains the Lagrangian nature of SPH by directly transferring pressures onto particles. Our method can be easily integrated with existing SPH techniques such as the incompressible PCISPH method as well as weakly compressible SPH by adding an additional force term. We show that this hybrid method accelerates convergence towards uniform density and permits a significantly larger time step compared to earlier approaches while producing similar results. We demonstrate our approach in a variety of scenarios with significant pressure gradients such as splashing liquids.

Hybrid Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

A Fluid Pressure Solver Handling Separating Solid Boundary Conditions

Nuttapong Chentanez, Matthias Mueller

We present a multigrid method for solving the linear complementarity problem (LCP) resulting from discretizing the Poisson equation subject to separating solid boundary conditions in an Eulerian liquid simulation’s pressure projection step. The method requires only a few small changes to a multigrid solver for linear systems. Our generalized solver is fast enough to handle 3D liquid simulations with separating boundary conditions in practical domain sizes. Previous methods could only handle relatively small 2D domains in reasonable time because they used expensive quadratic programming (QP) solvers. We demonstrate our technique in several practical scenarios in which the omission of separating boundary conditions results in disturbing artifacts of liquid sticking to walls.

A Fluid Pressure Solver Handling Separating Solid Boundary Conditions

Asynchronous Integration with Phantom Meshes

David Harmon, Qingnan Zhou, Denis Zorin

Asynchronous variational integration of layered contact models provides a framework for robust collision handling, correct physical behavior, and guaranteed eventual resolution of even the most difficult contact problems. Yet, even for low-contact scenarios, this approach is significantly slower compared to its less robust alternatives — often due to handling of stiff elastic forces in an explicit framework. We propose a method that retains the guarantees, but allows for variational implicit integration of some of the forces, while maintaining asynchronous integration needed for contact handling. Our method uses phantom meshes for calculations with stiff forces, which are then coupled to the original mesh through constraints. We use the augmented discrete Lagrangian of the constrained system to derive a variational integrator with the desired conservation properties.

Asynchronous Integration with Phantom Meshes