Physics-Based Animation

• Differentiable Depth for Real2Sim Calibration of Soft Body Simulations
• How Will it Drape? Capturing Fabric Mechanics from Depth Images
• Physics-Informed Neural Corrector for Deformation-based Fluid Control
• An Optimization-based SPH Solver for Simulation of Hyperelastic Solids
• Monolithic Friction and Contact Handling for Rigid Bodies and Fluids using SPH
• Detail-Aware Deep Clothing Animations Infused with Multi-Source Attributes
• Designing Personalized Garments with Body Movement
• Interactive Design of 2D Car Profiles with Aerodynamic Feedback

Bo Ren, Xiaohan Ye, Zherong Pan, Taiyuan Zhang

We propose a learning-based controller for high-dimensional dynamic systems with coupled fluid and solid objects. The dynamic behaviors of such systems can vary across different simulators and the control tasks subject to changing requirements from users. Our controller features high versatility and can adapt to changing dynamic behaviors and multiple tasks without re-training, which is achieved by combining two training strategies. We use meta-reinforcement learning to inform the controller of changing
simulation parameters. We further design a novel task representation, which allows the controller to adapt to continually changing tasks via hindsight experience replay. We highlight the robustness and generality of our controller on a row of dynamic-rich tasks including scooping up solid balls from a water pool, in-air ball acrobatics using fluid spouts, and zero-shot transferring to unseen simulators and constitutive models. In all the scenarios, our controller consistently outperforms the plain multi-task reinforcement learning baseline.

Versatile Control of Fluid-Directed Solid Objects Using Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

Joshua Aurand, Raphaël Oritz, Sylvia Nauer, Vinicius Azevedo

Artistically controlling fluids has always been a challenging task. Recently, volumetric Neural Style Transfer (NST) techniques have been used to artistically manipulate smoke simulation data with 2D images. In this work, we revisit previous volumetric NST techniques for smoke, proposing a suite of upgrades that enable stylizations that are significantly faster, simpler, more controllable and less prone to artifacts. Moreover, the energy minimization solved by previous methods is camera dependent. To avoid that, a computationally expensive iterative optimization performed for multiple views sampled around the original simulation is needed, which can take up to several minutes per frame. We propose a simple feed-forward neural network architecture that is able to infer view-independent stylizations that are three orders of the magnitude faster than its optimization-based counterpart.

Efficient Neural Style Transfer For Volumetric Simulations

Haoyu Hu, Xinyu Yi, Hao Zhang, Jun-Hai Yong, Feng Xu

Single view-based reconstruction of hand-object interaction is challenging due to the severe observation missing caused by occlusions. This paper proposes a physics-based method to better solve the ambiguities in the reconstruction. It first proposes a force-based dynamic model of the in-hand object, which not only recovers the unobserved contacts but also solves for plausible contact forces. Next, a confidence-based slide prevention scheme is proposed, which combines both the kinematic confidences and the contact forces to jointly model static and sliding contact motion. Qualitative and quantitative experiments show that the proposed technique reconstructs both physically plausible and more accurate hand-object interaction and estimates plausible contact forces in real-time with a single RGBD sensor.

Physical Interaction: Reconstructing Hand-object Interactions with Physics

Tetsuya Takahashi, Christopher Batty

Simultaneous coupling of diverse physical systems poses significant computational challenges in terms of speed, quality, and stability. Rather than treating all components with a single discretization methodology (e.g., smoothed particles, material point method, Eulerian grid, etc.) that is ill-suited to some components, our solver, ElastoMonolith, addresses three-way interactions among standard particle-in-cell-based viscous and inviscid fluids, Lagrangian mesh-based deformable bodies, and rigid bodies. While prior methods often treat some terms explicitly or in a decoupled fashion for efficiency, often at the cost of robustness or stability, we demonstrate the effectiveness of a strong coupling approach that expresses all of the relevant physics within one consistent and unified optimization problem, including fluid pressure and viscosity, elasticity of the deformables, frictional solid-solid contact, and solid-fluid interface conditions. We further develop a numerical solver to tackle this difficult optimization problem, incorporating projected Newton, an active set method, and a transformation of the inner linear system matrix to ensure symmetric positive definiteness. Our experimental evaluations show that our framework can achieve high quality coupling results that avoid artifacts such as volume loss, instability, sticky contacts, and spurious interpenetrations.

ElastoMonolith: A Monolithic Optimization-based Liquid Solver for Contact-Aware Elastic-Solid Coupling

Jingrui Xing*, Liangwang Ruan*, Bin Wang, Bo Zhu, Baoquan Chen (*joint first authors)

This paper presents a novel approach to simulating surface tension flow within a position-based dynamics (PBD) framework. We enhance the conventional PBD fluid method in terms of its surface representation and constraint enforcement to furnish support for the simulation of interfacial phenomena driven by strong surface tension and contact dynamics. The key component of our framework is an on-the-fly local meshing algorithm to build the local geometry around each surface particle. Based on this local mesh structure, we devise novel surface constraints that can be integrated seamlessly into a PBD framework to model strong surface tension effects. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by simulating a multitude of surface tension flow examples exhibiting intricate interfacial dynamics of films and drops, which were all infeasible for a traditional PBD method.

Position-based Surface Tension Flow

Jumyung Chang, Ruben Partono, Vinicius C. Azevedo, Christopher Batty

We propose to augment standard grid-based fluid solvers with pointwise divergence-free velocity interpolation, thereby ensuring exact incompressibility down to the sub-cell level. Our method takes as input a discretely divergence-free velocity field generated by a staggered grid pressure projection, and first recovers a corresponding discrete vector potential. Instead of solving a costly vector Poisson problem for the potential, we develop a fast parallel sweeping strategy to find a candidate potential and apply a gauge transformation to enforce the Coulomb gauge condition and thereby make it numerically smooth. Interpolating this discrete potential generates a pointwise vector potential whose analytical curl is a pointwise incompressible velocity field. Our method further supports irregular solid geometry through the use of level set-based cut-cells and a novel Curl-Noise-inspired potential ramping procedure that simultaneously offers strictly non-penetrating velocities and incompressibility. Experimental comparisons demonstrate that the vector potential reconstruction procedure at the heart of our approach is consistently faster than prior such reconstruction schemes, especially those that solve vector Poisson problems. Moreover, in exchange for its modest extra cost, our overall Curl-Flow framework produces significantly improved particle trajectories that closely respect irregular obstacles, do not suffer from spurious sources or sinks, and yield superior particle distributions over time.

Curl-Flow: Boundary-Respecting Pointwise Incompressible Velocity Interpolation for Grid-Based Fluids

José Antonio Fernández-Fernández, Lukas Westhofen, Fabian Löschner, Stefan Rhys Jeske, Andreas Longva, Jan Bender

We present a new octree-based neighborhood search method for SPH simulation. A speedup of up to 1.9x is observed in comparison to state-of-the-art methods which rely on uniform grids. While our method focuses on maximizing performance in fixed-radius SPH simulations, we show that it can also be used in scenarios where the particle support radius is not constant thanks to the adaptive nature of the octree acceleration structure. Neighborhood search methods typically consist of an acceleration structure that prunes the space of possible particle neighbor pairs, followed by direct distance comparisons between the remaining particle pairs. Previous works have focused on minimizing the number of comparisons. However, in an effort to minimize the actual computation time, we find that distance comparisons exhibit very high throughput on modern CPUs. By permitting more comparisons than strictly necessary, the time spent on preparing and searching the acceleration structure can be reduced, yielding a net positive speedup. The choice of an octree acceleration structure, instead of the uniform grid typically used in fixed-radius methods, ensures balanced computational tasks. This benefits both parallelism and provides consistently high computational intensity for the distance comparisons. We present a detailed account of high-level considerations that, together with low-level decisions, enable high throughput for performance-critical parts of the algorithm. Finally, we demonstrate the high performance of our algorithm on a number of large-scale fixed-radius SPH benchmarks and show in experiments with a support radius ratio up to 3 that our method is also effective in multi-resolution SPH simulations.

Fast Octree Neighborhood Search for SPH Simulations

Sadashige Ishida,Chris Wojtan,Albert Chern

This paper presents a new representation of curve dynamics, with applications to vortex filaments in fluid dynamics. Instead of representing these filaments with explicit curve geometry and Lagrangian equations of motion, we represent curves implicitly with a new co-dimensional 2 level set description. Our implicit representation admits several redundant mathematical degrees of freedom in both the configuration and the dynamics of the curves, which can be tailored specifically to improve numerical robustness, in contrast to naive approaches for implicit curve dynamics that suffer from overwhelming numerical stability problems. Furthermore, we note how these hidden degrees of freedom perfectly map to a Clebsch representation in fluid dynamics. Motivated by these observations, we introduce untwisted level set functions and non-swirling dynamics which successfully regularize sources of numerical instability, particularly in the twisting modes around curve filaments. A consequence is a novel simulation method which produces stable dynamics for large numbers of interacting vortex filaments and effortlessly handles topological changes and re-connection events.

Hidden Degrees of Freedom in Implicit Vortex Filaments

Yifei Li, Tao Du, Sangeetha Grama Srinivasan, Kui Wu, Bo Zhu, Eftychios Sifakis, Wojciech Matusik

Fluidic devices are crucial components in many industrial applications involving fluid mechanics. Computational design of a high-performance fluidic system faces multifaceted challenges regarding its geometric representation and physical accuracy. We present a novel topology optimization method to design fluidic devices in a Stokes flow context. Our approach is featured by its capability in accommodating a broad spectrum of boundary conditions at the solid-fluid interface. Our key contribution is an anisotropic and differentiable constitutive model that unifies the representation of different phases and boundary conditions in a Stokes model, enabling a topology optimization method that can synthesize novel structures with accurate boundary conditions from a background grid discretization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach by conducting several fluidic system design tasks with over two million design parameters.

Fluidic Topology Optimization with an Anisotropic Mixture Model