We present a new approach for simulating deformable objects. The underlying model is geometrically motivated. It handles pointbased objects and does not need connectivity information. The approach does not require any pre-processing, is simple to compute, and provides unconditionally stable dynamic simulations. The main idea of our deformable model is to replace energies by geometric constraints and forces by distances of current positions to goal positions. These goal positions are determined via a generalized shape matching of an undeformed rest state with the current deformed state of the point cloud. Since points are always drawn towards well-defined locations, the overshooting problem of explicit integration schemes is eliminated. The versatility of the approach in terms of object representations that can be handled, the efficiency in terms of memory and computational complexity, and the unconditional stability of the dynamic simulation make the approach particularly interesting for games.

This paper presents a method for animating gases on unstructured tetrahedral meshes to efficiently model the interaction of fluids with irregularly shaped obstacles. Because our discretization scheme parallels that of the standard staggered grid mesh, we are able to combine tetrahedral cells with regular hexahedral cells in a single mesh. This hybrid mesh offers both accuracy near obstacles and efficiency in open regions.

We present a new particle-based method for viscoelastic fluid simulation. We achieve realistic small-scale behavior of substances such as paint or mud as they splash on moving objects. Incompressibility and particle anti-clustering are enforced with a double density relaxation procedure which updates particle positions according to two opposing pressure terms. From this process surface tension effects emerge, enabling drop and filament formation. Elastic and non-linear plastic effects are obtained by adding springs with varying rest length between particles. We also extend the technique to handle interaction between fluid and dynamic objects. Various simulation scenarios are presented including rain drops, fountains, clay manipulation, and floating objects. The method is robust and stable, and can animate splashing behavior at interactive framerates.

This paper presents an approach to collision detection and response for dynamically deforming pointbased objects. Both the volume of an object and its surface are represented by point sets. In case of a collision, response forces are computed for penetrating surface points and distributed to volume points which are used for simulating the object dynamics. The decoupling of collision handling and deformation allows for a very stable collision response while maintaining interactive update rates of the dynamic simulation for environments with moderate complexity. Simulation results are presented for elastically and plastically deforming objects with changing topology.

Though motion planning has been studied extensively for rigid and articulated robots, motion planning for deformable objects is an area that has received far less attention. In this paper we present a framework for planning paths in completely deformable, elastic environments. In particular we apply a deformable model to the robot and obstacles in the environment and we present a kinodynamic planning algorithm suited for this type of deformable motion planning. The planning algorithm is based on the Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree (rrt) path planning algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that plans paths in totally deformable environments. Figure 1: Barriers Environment. Both the robot (the cube) and the obstacles (the plate barriers) in this environment are deformable. This image sequence is shown from left to right and from top to bottom. 1

We present efficient data structures and caching schemes to accelerate ray-surface intersections for deforming point-sampled surfaces. By exploiting spatial and temporal coherence of the deformation during the animation, we are able to improve rendering performance by a factor of two to three compared to existing techniques. Starting from a tight bounding sphere hierarchy for the undeformed object, we use a lazy updating scheme to adapt the hierarchy to the deformed surface in each animation step. In addition, we achieve a significant speedup for ray-surface intersections by caching per-ray intersection points. We also present a technique for rendering sharp edges and corners in point-sampled models by introducing a novel surface clipping algorithm.

In this article we present a new multiscale surface representation based on point samples. Given an unstructured point cloud as input, our method first computes a series of point-based surface approximations at successively higher levels of smoothness, that is, coarser scales of detail, using geometric low-pass filtering. These point clouds are then encoded relative to each other by expressing each level as a scalar displacement of its predecessor. Low-pass filtering and encoding are combined in an efficient multilevel projection operator using local weighted least squares fitting. Our representation is motivated by the need for higher-level editing semantics which allow surface modifications at different scales. The user would be able to edit the surface at different approximation levels to perform coarse-scale edits on the whole model as well as very localized modifications on the surface detail. Additionally, the multiscale representation provides a separation in geometric scale which can be understood as a spectral decomposition of the surface geometry. Based on this observation, advanced geometric filtering methods can be implemented that mimic the effects of Fourier filters to achieve effects such as smoothing, enhancement, or band-bass filtering.

We introduce a method for efficiently animating a wide range of deformable materials. We combine a high resolution surface mesh with a tetrahedral finite element simulator that makes use of frequent re-meshing. This combination allows for fast and detailed simulations of complex elastic and plastic behavior. We significantly expand the range of physical parameters that can be simulated with a single technique, and the results are free from common artifacts such as volume-loss, smoothing, popping, and the absence of thin features like strands and sheets. Our decision to couple a high resolution surface with low-resolution physics leads to efficient simulation and detailed surface features, and our approach to creating the tetrahedral mesh leads to an order-of-magnitude speedup over previous techniques in the time spent re-meshing. We compute masses, collisions, and surface tension forces on the scale of the fine mesh, which helps avoid visual artifacts due to the differing mesh resolutions. The result is a method that can simulate a large array of different material behaviors with high resolution features in a short amount of time.

We present a new framework for interactive shape deformation modeling and key frame interpolation based on a meshless finite element formulation. Starting from a coarse nodal sampling of an object’s volume, we formulate rigidity and volume preservation constraints that are enforced to yield realistic shape deformations at interactive frame rates. Additionally, by specifying key frame poses of the deforming shape and optimizing the nodal displacements while targeting smooth interpolated motion, our algorithm extends to a motion planning framework for deformable objects. This allows reconstructing smooth and plausible deformable shape trajectories in the presence of possibly moving obstacles. The presented results illustrate that our framework can handle complex shapes at interactive rates and hence is a valuable tool for animators to realistically and efficiently model and interpolate deforming 3D shapes.

We propose machine learning methods for the estimation of deformation fields that transform two given objects into each other, thereby establishing a dense point to point correspondence. The fields are computed using a modified support vector machine containing a penalty enforcing that points of one object will be mapped to “similar ” points on the other one. Our system, which contains little engineering or domain knowledge, delivers state of the art performance. We present application results including close to photorealistic morphs of 3D head models. 1.