In this paper we present a fast and robust approach for simulating elasto-plastic materials and fracture in real time. Our method extends the warped stiffness finite element approach for linear elasticity and combines it with a strain-state-based plasticity model. The internal principal stress components provided by the finite element computation are used to determine fracture locations and orientations. We also present a method to consistently animate and fracture a detailed surface mesh along with the underlying volumetric tetrahedral mesh. This multi-resolution strategy produces realistic animations of a wide spectrum of materials at interactive rates that have typically been simulated off-line thus far.

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.

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Physically based deformable models have been widely embraced by the Computer Graphics community. Many problems outlined in a previous survey by Gibson and Mirtich [GM97] have been addressed, thereby making these models interesting and useful for both offline and real-time applications, such as motion pictures and video games. In this paper, we present the most significant contributions of the past decade, which produce such impressive and perceivably realistic animations and simulations: finite element/difference/volume methods, mass-spring systems, meshfree methods, coupled particle systems and reduced deformable models based on modal analysis. For completeness, we also make a connection to the simulation of other continua, such as fluids, gases and melting objects. Since time integration is inherent to all simulated phenomena, the general notion of time discretization is treated separately, while specifics are left to the respective models. Finally, we discuss areas of application, such as elastoplastic deformation and fracture, cloth and hair animation, virtual surgery simulation, interactive entertainment and fluid/smoke animation, and also suggest areas for future research.

Good character animation requires convincing skin deformations including subtleties and details like muscle bulges. Such effects are typically created in commercial animation packages which provide very general and powerful tools. While these systems are convenient and flexible for artists, the generality often leads to characters that are slow to compute or that require a substantial amount of memory and thus cannot be used in interactive systems. Instead, interactive systems restrict artists to a specific character deformation model which is fast and memory efficient but is notoriously difficult to author and can suffer from many deformation artifacts. This paper presents an automated framework that allows character artists to use the full complement of tools in high-end systems to create characters for interactive systems. Our method starts with an arbitrarily rigged character in an animation system. A set of examples is exported, consisting of skeleton configurations paired with the deformed geometry as static meshes. Using these examples, we fit the parameters of a deformation model that best approximates the original data yet remains fast to compute and compact in memory. Keywords: Interactive, Skin, Approximation I

In this paper, we present an approach for fast subspace integration of reduced-coordinate nonlinear deformable models that is suitable for interactive applications in computer graphics and haptics. Our approach exploits dimensional model reduction to build reduced-coordinate deformable models for objects with complex geome-try. We exploit the fact that model reduction on large deforma-tion models with linear materials (as commonly used in graphics) result in internal force models that are simply cubic polynomials in reduced coordinates. Coefficients of these polynomials can be precomputed, for efficient runtime evaluation. This allows simula-tion of nonlinear dynamics using fast implicit Newmark subspace integrators, with subspace integration costs independent of geomet-ric complexity. We present two useful approaches for generating low-dimensional subspace bases: modal derivatives and an interac-tive sketching technique. Mass-scaled principal component analy-sis (mass-PCA) is suggested for dimensionality reduction. Finally, several examples are given from computer animation to illustrate high performance, including force-feedback haptic rendering of a complicated object undergoing large deformations.

We propose a virtual node algorithm that allows material to separate along arbitrary (possibly branched) piecewise linear paths through a mesh. The material within an element is fragmented by creating several replicas of the element and assigning a portion of real material to each replica. This results in elements that contain both real material and empty regions. The missing material is contained in another copy (or copies) of this element. Our new virtual node algorithm automatically determines the number of replicas and the assignment of material to each. Moreover, it provides the degrees of freedom required to simulate the partially or fully fragmented material in a fashion consistent with the embedded geometry. This approach enables efficient simulation of complex geometry with a simple mesh, i.e. the geometry need not align itself with element boundaries. It also alleviates many shortcomings of traditional Lagrangian simulation techniques for meshes with changing topology. For example, slivers do not require small CFL time step restrictions since they are embedded in well shaped larger elements. To enable robust simulation of embedded geometry, we propose new algorithms for handling rigid body and self collisions. In addition, we present several mechanisms for influencing and controlling fracture with grain boundaries, prescoring, etc. We illustrate our method for both volumetric and thin-shell simulations.

We introduce a simple technique that enables robust approximation of volumetric, large-deformation dynamics for real-time or largescale offline simulations. We propose Lattice Shape Matching, an extension of deformable shape matching to regular lattices with embedded geometry; lattice vertices are smoothed by convolution of rigid shape matching operators on local lattice regions, with the effective mechanical stiffness specified by the amount of smoothing via region width. Since the naïve method can be very slow for stiff models – per-vertex costs scale cubically with region width – we provide a fast summation algorithm, Fast Lattice Shape Matching (FastLSM), that exploits the inherent summation redundancy of shape matching and can provide large-region matching at constant per-vertex cost. With this approach, large lattices can be simulated in linear time. We present several examples and benchmarks of an efficient CPU implementation, including many dozens of soft bodies simulated at real-time rates on a typical desktop machine.

Enveloping (or skinning) is the process that relates a skeleton, which an animator controls, to a 3-D surface mesh, which the audience sees. This process is necessary in most com-puter graphics applications that involve animated characters. The complexity (and speed) of enveloping solutions vary from photo-realistic muscle simulations used for movie pro-duction, to artifact-ridden heuristics such as linear blend skinning used for video games and training simulations. We propose a method for example-based enveloping of 3-D characters. We can ap-proximate the output of muscle simulations or other high-quality enveloping tools with a model that can be evaluated at speeds comparable to the fastest enveloping techniques. Our technique introduces a rotational regression model that can accurately capture common skinning behaviors such as muscle bulging, twisting, and challenging areas such as the shoulders. Our better treatment of rotational quantities is made possible by a framework that predicts mesh deformation gradients instead of mesh vertex positions. We reconstruct the vertex positions from deformation gradients in an additional step by solving a Poisson

Skinning of skeletally deformable models is extensively used for real-time animation of characters, creatures and similar objects. The standard solution, linear blend skinning, has some serious drawbacks that require artist intervention. Therefore, a number of alternatives have been proposed in recent years. All of them successfully combat some of the artifacts, but none challenge the simplicity and efficiency of linear blend skinning. As a result, linear blend skinning is still the number one choice for the majority of developers. In this paper, we present a novel skinning algorithm based on linear combination of dual quaternions. Even though our proposed method is approximate, it does not exhibit any of the artifacts inherent in previous methods and still permits an efficient GPU implementation. Upgrading an existing animation system from linear to dual quaternion skinning is very easy and has a relatively minor impact on run-time performance.