Local-global solvers such as ADMM for elastic simulation and geometry optimization struggle to resolve large rotations such as bending and twisting modes, and large distortions in the presence of barrier energies. We propose two improvements to address these challenges. First, we introduce a novel local-global splitting based on the polar decomposition that separates the geometric nonlinearity of rotations from the material nonlinearity of the deformation energy. The resulting ADMM-based algorithm is a combination of an L-BFGS solve in the global step and proximal updates of element stretches in the local step. We also introduce a novel method for dynamic reweighting that is used to adjust element weights at runtime for improved convergence. With both improved rotation handling and element weighting, our algorithm is considerably faster than state-of-the-art approaches for quasi-static simulations. It is also much faster at making early progress in parameterization problems, making it valuable as an initializer to jump-start second-order algorithms.

We propose a method for accurately simulating dissipative forces in deformable bodies when using optimization-based integrators. We represent such forces using dissipation functions which may be nonlinear in both positions and velocities, enabling us to model a range of dissipative effects including Coulomb friction, Rayleigh damping, and power-law dissipation. We propose a general method for incorporating dissipative forces into optimization-based time integration schemes, which hitherto have been applied almost exclusively to systems with only conservative forces. To improve accuracy and minimize artificial damping, we provide an optimization-based version of the second-order accurate TR-BDF2 integrator. Finally, we present a method for modifying arbitrary dissipation functions to conserve linear and angular momentum, allowing us to eliminate the artificial angular momentum loss caused by Rayleigh damping.

Cloth dynamics plays an important role in the visual appearance of moving characters. Properly accounting for contact and friction is of utmost importance to avoid cloth-body and cloth-cloth penetration and to capture typical folding and stick-slip behavior due to dry friction. We present here the first method able to account for cloth contact with exact Coulomb friction, treating both cloth self-contacts and contacts occurring between the cloth and an underlying character. Our key contribution is to observe that for a nodal system like cloth, the frictional contact problem may be formulated based on velocities as primary variables, without having to compute the costly Delassus operator. Then, by reversing the roles classically played by the velocities and the contact impulses, conical complementarity solvers of the literature can be adapted to solve for compatible velocities at nodes. To handle the full complexity of cloth dynamics scenarios, we have extended this base algorithm in two ways: first, towards the accurate treatment of frictional contact at any location of the cloth, through an adaptive node refinement strategy; second, towards the handling of multiple constraints at each node, through the duplication of constrained nodes and the adding of pin constraints between duplicata. Our method allows us to handle the complex cloth-cloth and cloth-body interactions in full-size garments with an unprecedented level of realism compared to former methods, while maintaining reasonable computational timings.

We apply the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) optimization algorithm to implicit time integration of elastic bodies, and show that the resulting method closely relates to the recently proposed projective dynamics algorithm. However, as ADMM is a general purpose optimization algorithm applicable to a broad range of objective functions, it permits the use of nonlinear constitutive models and hard constraints while retaining the speed, parallelizability, and robustness of projective dynamics. We further extend the algorithm to improve the handling of dynamically changing constraints such as sliding and contact, while maintaining the benefits of a constant, prefactored system matrix. We demonstrate the benefits of our algorithm on several examples that include cloth, collisions, and volumetric deformable bodies with nonlinear elasticity and skin sliding effects.