Quadratic Contact Energy Model for Multi-Impact Simulation

Tianxiang Zhang, Sheng Li, Guoping Wang, Dinesh Manocha, Hanqiu Sun

Simultaneous multi-impact simulation is a challenging problem in modeling collision for rigid bodies. There are several physical criteria for an ideal model of rigid body collision, but existing models generally fail to meet one or more of them. In order to reveal the inner process of potential energy variation, which is the physical fundamental of collision in a multi-impact system, we propose a novel quadratic contact energy model for rigid body simulation. Through constructing quadratic energy functions with respect to impulse, post-impact reactions of rigid bodies can be computed efficiently. Our model can fulfil all the physical criteria and can simulate various natural phenomena including wave effect in particular. Besides, our model has high compatibility to be embedded into the Linear Complementary Problem (LCP) easily and can provide feasible results with any restitution coefficient. With a solid physical base, our model can solve the simultaneous multi-impact problem efficiently with high fidelity and robustness, as demonstrated in the experiment results.

Quadratic Contact Energy Model for Multi-Impact Simulation