Abstract We introduce a triangle mesh based convolutional neural network. The proposed network structure can be used for problems where input and/or output are defined on a manifold triangle mesh with or without boundary. We demonstrate its applications in cloth upsampling, adding back details to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) compressed cloth, regressing clothing deformation from character poses, and regressing hand skin deformation from bones' joint angles. The data used for training in this work are generated from high resolution extended position based dynamics (XPBD) physics simulations with small time steps and high iteration counts and from an offline FEM simulator, but it can come from other sources. The inference time of our prototype implementation, depending on the mesh resolution and the network size, can provide between 4 to 134 times faster than a GPU based simulator. The inference also only needs to be done for meshes currently visible by the camera.

Abstract We examine the relationship between primal, or force‐based, and dual, or constraint‐based formulations of dynamics. Variational frameworks such as Projective Dynamics have proved popular for deformable simulation, however they have not been adopted for contact‐rich scenarios such as rigid body simulation. We propose a new preconditioned frictional contact solver that is compatible with existing primal optimization methods, and competitive with complementarity‐based approaches. Our relaxed primal model generates improved contact force distributions when compared to dual methods, and has the advantage of being differentiable, making it well‐suited for trajectory optimization. We derive both primal and dual methods from a common variational point of view, and present a comprehensive numerical analysis of both methods with respect to conditioning. We demonstrate our method on scenarios including rigid body contact, deformable simulation, and robotic manipulation.

Abstract We present a rigid body simulation method that can resolve small temporal and spatial details by using a quasi explicit integration scheme that is unconditionally stable. Traditional rigid body simulators linearize constraints because they operate on the velocity level or solve the equations of motion implicitly thereby freezing the constraint directions for multiple iterations. Our method always works with the most recent constraint directions. This allows us to trace high speed motion of objects colliding against curved geometry, to reduce the number of constraints, to increase the robustness of the simulation, and to simplify the formulation of the solver. In this paper we provide all the details to implement a fully fledged rigid body solver that handles contacts, a variety of joint types and the interaction with soft objects.

We present a novel explicit surface tracking method. Its main advantage over existing approaches is the fact that it is both completely grid-free and fast which makes it ideal for the use in large unbounded domains. A further advantage is that its running time is less sensitive to temporal variations of the input mesh than existing approaches. In terms of performance, the method provides a good trade-off point between speed and quality. The main idea behind our approach to handle topological changes is to delete all overlapping triangles and to fill or join the resulting holes in a robust and efficient way while guaranteeing that the output mesh is both manifold and without boundary. We demonstrate the flexibility, speed and quality of our method in various applications such as Eulerian and Lagrangian liquid simulations and the simulation of solids under large plastic deformations.

We propose a new method for both collision detection and collision response geared towards handling complex deformable objects in close contact. Our method does not miss collision events between time steps and solves the challenging problem of untangling automatically and robustly. It is conceptually simple and straight forward to parallelize due to the regularity of the algorithm. The main idea is to tessellate the air between objects once before the simulation and by considering one unilateral constraint per element that prevents its inversion during the simulation. If large relative rotations and translations are present in the simulation, an additional dynamic mesh optimization step is needed to prevent mesh locking. This step is fast in 2D and allows the simulation of arbitrary scenes. Because mesh optimization is expensive in 3D, however, the method is best suited for the subclass of 3D scenarios in which relative motions are limited. This subclass contains two important problems, namely the simulation of multi-layered clothing and tissue on animated characters.

We propose a new method to simulate large scale water phenomena by combining particle, 3D grid and height field methods. In contrast to most hybrid approaches that use particles to simulate foam and spray only, we also represent the bulk of water near the surface with both particles and a grid depending on the regions of interest and switch between those two representations during the course of the simulation. For the coupling we leverage the recent idea of tracking the water surface with a density field in grid based methods. Combining particles and a grid simulation then amounts to adding the density field of the particles and the one stored on the grid. For open scenes, we simulate the water outside of the 3D grid domain by solving the Shallow Water Equations on a height field. We propose new methods to couple these two domains such that waves travel naturally across the border. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in various scenarios including a whale breaching simulation, all running in real-time or at interactive rates.

We present a unified dynamics framework for real-time visual effects. Using particles connected by constraints as our fundamental building block allows us to treat contact and collisions in a unified manner, and we show how this representation is flexible enough to model gases, liquids, deformable solids, rigid bodies and cloth with two-way interactions. We address some common problems with traditional particle-based methods and describe a parallel constraint solver based on position-based dynamics that is efficient enough for real-time applications.

Abstract We present a new technique which can handle both point and sliding constraints in the multigrid (MG) framework. Although the MG method can theoretically perform as fast as O(N), the development of a clothing simulator based on the MG method calls for solving an important technical challenge: handling the constraints. Resolving constrains has been difficult in MG because there has been no clear way to transfer the constraints existing in the finest level mesh to the coarser level meshes. This paper presents a new formulation based on soft constraints, which can coarsen the constraints defined in the finest level to the coarser levels. Experiments are performed which show that the proposed method can solve the linear system up to 4–9 times faster in comparison with the modified preconditioned conjugate gradient method (MPCG) without quality degradation. The proposed method is easy to implement and can be straightforwardly applied to existing clothing simulators which are based on implicit time integration.

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a method for simulating the dynamics of porous deformable shells in the presence of water that floats on the surface or is absorbed into the interior. The proposed method enables various effects such as surface flow, capillary flow involving absorption and saturation of water, changes of the material properties caused by water saturation, and the deformable body dynamics including tearing. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method produces promising results.Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We propose a new fast, robust and controllable method to simulate the dynamic destruction of large and complex objects in real time. The common method for fracture simulation in computer games is to pre-fracture models and replace objects by their pre-computed parts at run-time. This popular method is computationally cheap but has the disadvantages that the fracture pattern does not align with the impact location and that the number of hierarchical fracture levels is fixed. Our method allows dynamic fracturing of large objects into an unlimited number of pieces fast enough to be used in computer games. We represent visual meshes by volumetric approximate convex decompositions (VACD) and apply user-defined fracture patterns dependent on the impact location. The method supports partial fracturing meaning that fracture patterns can be applied locally at multiple locations of an object. We propose new methods for computing a VACD, for approximate convex hull construction and for detecting islands in the convex decomposition after partial destruction in order to determine support structures.