Interactive Two-Way Shape Design of Elastic Bodies

We present a novel system for interactive elastic shape design in both forward and inverse fashions. Using this system, the user can choose to edit the rest shape or the quasistatic shape of an elastic solid, and obtain the other shape that matches under the quasistatic equilibrium condition at the same time. The development of this system is based on the discovery that inverse quasistatic simulation can be immediately solved by Newton’s method with a direct solver. To implement our simulator, we propose a Jacobian matrix evaluation scheme for the inverse elastic problem and we present step length and matrix evaluation techniques that improve the simulation performance. While our simulator is efficient, it is still not fast enough for the system to generate the result in real time. Our solution is a shape initialization method using the recent projective dynamics technique. Shape initialization not only works as a fast preview function during the user editing process, but also speeds up the convergence of quasistatic or inverse quasistatic simulation afterwards. The use of a heterogeneous algorithm structure allows the system to further reduce its preview cost, by utilizing the power of both the CPU and the GPU. Our experiment demonstrates that the whole system is fast, robust, and convenient for the designer to use in both forward and inverse elastic shape design. It can handle a variet of nonlinear elastic material models, and its runtime performance has space for more improvement.