Physics-Based Animation

Lei Lan, Zixuan Lu, Jingyi Long, Chun Yuan, Xuan Li, Xiaowei He, Huamin Wang, Chenfanfu Jiang, Yin Yang

This paper pushes the performance of cloth simulation, making the simulation interactive even for high-resolution garment models while keeping every triangle untangled. The penetration-free guarantee is inspired by the interior point method, which converts the inequality constraints to barrier potentials. We propose a major overhaul of this modality within the projective dynamics framework by leveraging an adaptive weighting mechanism inspired by barrier formulation. This approach does not depend on the distance between mesh primitives, but on the virtual life span of a collision event and thus keeps all the vertices within feasible region. Such a non-distance barrier model allows a new way to integrate collision resolution into the simulation pipeline. Another contributor to the performance boost comes from the subspace reuse strategy. This is based on the observation that low-frequency strain propagation is near orthogonal to the deformation induced by collisions or self-collisions, often of high frequency. Subspace reuse then takes care of low-frequency residuals, while high-frequency residuals can also be effectively smoothed by GPU-based iterative solvers. We show that our method outperforms existing fast cloth simulators by at least one order while producing high-quality animations of high-resolution models.

Efficient GPU Cloth Simulation with Non-distance Barriers and Subspace Reuse

Chun Yuan, Haoyang Shi, Lei Lan, Yuxing Qiu, Cem Yuksel, Huamin Wang, Chenfanfu Jiang, Kui Wu, Yin Yang

This paper presents volumetric homogenization, a spatially varying homogenization scheme for knitwear simulation. We are motivated by the observation that macro-scale fabric dynamics is strongly correlated with its underlying knitting patterns. Therefore, homogenization towards a single material is less effective when the knitting is complex and non-repetitive. Our method tackles this challenge by homogenizing the yarn-level material locally at volumetric elements. Assigning a virtual volume of a knitting structure enables us to model bending and twisting effects via a simple volume-preserving penalty and thus effectively alleviates the material nonlinearity. We employ an adjoint Gauss-Newton formulation to battle the dimensionality challenge of such per-element material optimization. This intuitive material model makes the forward simulation GPU-friendly. To this end, our pipeline also equips a novel domain-decomposed subspace solver crafted for GPU projective dynamics, which makes our simulator hundreds of times faster than the yarn-level simulator. Experiments validate the capability and effectiveness of volumetric homogenization. Our method produces realistic animations of knitwear matching the quality of full-scale yarn-level simulations. It is also orders of magnitude faster than existing homogenization techniques in both the training and simulation stages.

Volumetric Homogenization for Knitwear Simulation

Sinan Wang, Yitong Deng, Molin Deng, Hong-Xing Yu, Junwei Zhou, Duowen Chen, Taku Komura, Jiajun Wu, Bo Zhu

We present an Eulerian vortex method based on the theory of flow maps to simulate the complex vortical motions of incompressible fluids. Central to our method is the novel incorporation of the flow-map transport equations for line elements, which, in combination with a bi-directional marching scheme for flow maps, enables the high-fidelity Eulerian advection of vorticity variables. The fundamental motivation is that, compared to impulse 𝒎, which has been recently bridged with flow maps to encouraging results, vorticity 𝝎 promises to be preferable for its numerically stability and physical interpretability. To realize the full potential of this novel formulation, we develop a new Poisson solving scheme for vorticity-to-velocity reconstruction that is both efficient and able to accurately handle the coupling near solid boundaries. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach with a range of vortex simulation examples, including leapfrog vortices, vortex collisions, cavity flow, and the formation of complex vortical structures due to solid-fluid interactions.

An Eulerian Vortex Method on Flow Maps

Duowen Chen, Zhiqi Li, Junwei Zhou, Fan Feng, Tao Du, Bo Zhu

We propose a novel solid-fluid interaction method for coupling elastic solids with impulse flow maps. Our key idea is to unify the representation of fluid and solid components as particle flow maps with different lengths and dynamics. The solid-fluid coupling is enabled by implementing two novel mechanisms: first, we developed an impulse-to-velocity transfer mechanism to unify the exchanged physical quantities; second, we devised a particle path integral mechanism to accumulate coupling forces along each flow-map trajectory. Our framework integrates these two mechanisms into an Eulerian-Lagrangian impulse fluid simulator to accommodate traditional coupling models, exemplified by the Material Point Method (MPM) and Immersed Boundary Method (IBM), within a particle flow map framework. We demonstrate our method’s efficacy by simulating solid-fluid interactions exhibiting strong vortical dynamics, including various vortex shedding and interaction examples across swimming, falling, breezing, and combustion.

Solid-Fluid Interaction on Particle Flow Maps

Zhiqi Li, Duowen Chen, Candong Lin, Jinyuan Liu, Bo Zhu

We propose a novel framework for simulating ink as a particle-laden flow using particle flow maps. Our method addresses the limitations of existing flow-map techniques, which struggle with dissipative forces like viscosity and drag, thereby extending the application scope from solving the Euler equations to solving the Navier-Stokes equations with accurate viscosity and laden-particle treatment. Our key contribution lies in a coupling mechanism for two particle systems, coupling physical sediment particles and virtual flow-map particles on a background grid by solving a Poisson system. We implemented a novel path integral formula to incorporate viscosity and drag forces into the particle flow map process. Our approach enables state-of-the-art simulation of various particle-laden flow phenomena, exemplified by the bulging and breakup of suspension drop tails, torus formation, torus disintegration, and the coalescence of sedimenting drops. In particular, our method delivered high-fidelity ink diffusion simulations by accurately capturing vortex bulbs, viscous tails, fractal branching, and hierarchical structures.

Particle-Laden Fluid on Flow Maps

Mohammad Sina Nabizadeh, Ritoban Roy-Chowdhury, Hang Yin, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Albert Chern

We propose Coadjoint Orbit FLIP (CO-FLIP), a high order accurate, structure preserving fluid simulation method in the hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian framework. We start with a Hamiltonian formulation of the incompressible Euler Equations, and then, using a local, explicit, and high order divergence free interpolation, construct a modified Hamiltonian system that governs our discrete Euler flow. The resulting discretization, when paired with a geometric time integration scheme, is energy and circulation preserving (formally the flow evolves on a coadjoint orbit) and is similar to the Fluid Implicit Particle (FLIP) method. CO-FLIP enjoys multiple additional properties including that the pressure projection is exact in the weak sense, and the particle-to-grid transfer is an exact inverse of the grid-to-particle interpolation. The method is demonstrated numerically with outstanding stability, energy, and Casimir preservation. We show that the method produces benchmarks and turbulent visual effects even at low grid resolutions.

Fluid Implicit Particles on Coadjoint Orbits

Jiayi Eris Zhang, Doug L. James, Danny M. Kaufman

We propose Progressive Dynamics, a coarse-to-fine, level-of-detail simulation method for the physics-based animation of complex frictionally contacting thin shell and cloth dynamics. Progressive Dynamics provides tight-matching consistency and progressive improvement across levels, with comparable quality and realism to high-fidelity, IPC-based shell simulations [Li et al. 2021] at finest resolutions. Together these features enable an efficient animation-design pipeline with predictive coarse-resolution previews providing rapid design iterations for a final, to-be-generated, high-resolution animation. In contrast, previously, to design such scenes with comparable dynamics would require prohibitively slow design iterations via repeated direct simulations on high-resolution meshes. We evaluate and demonstrate Progressive Dynamics’s features over a wide range of challenging stress-tests, benchmarks, and animation design tasks. Here Progressive Dynamics efficiently computes consistent previews at costs comparable to coarsest-level direct simulations. Its matching progressive refinements across levels then generate rich, high-resolution animations with high-speed dynamics, impacts, and the complex detailing of the dynamic wrinkling, folding, and sliding of frictionally contacting thin shells and fabrics.

Progressive Dynamics for Cloth and Shell Animation

C. Zhao, Tamar Shinar, Craig Schroeder

In this paper, we present a novel network-based approach for reconstructing signed distance functions from fluid particles. The method uses a weighting kernel to transfer particles to a regular grid, which forms the input to a convolutional neural network. We propose a regression-based regularization to reduce surface noise without penalizing high-curvature features. The reconstruction exhibits improved spatial surface smoothness and temporal coherence compared with existing state of the art surface reconstruction methods. The method is insensitive to particle sampling density and robustly handles thin features, isolated particles, and sharp edges.

Reconstruction of implicit surfaces from fluid particles using convolutional neural networks

• Fluid Implicit Particles on Coadjoint Orbits
• Particle-Laden Fluid on Flow Maps
• An Eulerian Vortex Method on Flow Maps
• Solid-Fluid Interaction on Particle Flow Maps
• Volumetric Homogenization for Knitwear Simulation
• Efficient Cloth Simulation Using Non-distance Barriers and Subspace Reuse
• Barrier-Augmented Lagrangian for GPU-based Elastodynamic Contact
• XPBI: Position-Based Dynamics with Smoothing Kernels Handles Continuum Inelasticity
• Computational Biomimetics of Winged Seeds
• Optimized shock-protecting microstructures
• Tencers: Tension-Constrained Elastic Rods
• Polar Interpolants for Thin-Shell Microstructure Homogenization
• A Time-Dependent Inclusion-Based Method for Continuous Collision Detection between Parametric Surfaces
• gDist: Efficient Distance Computation between 3D Meshes on GPU
• A Cubic Barrier with Elasticity-Inclusive Dynamic Stiffness
• Trading Spaces: Adaptive Subspace Time Integration for Contacting Elastodynamics
• Q3T Prisms: A Linear-Quadratic Solid Shell Element for Elastoplastic Surfaces
• An Impulse Ghost Fluid Method for Simulating Two-Phase Flows
• A Mesh-based Simulation Framework using Automatic Code Generation

Egor Larionov, Andreas Longva, Uri M. Ascher, Jan Bender, Dinesh K. Pai

Dynamics simulation with frictional contacts is important for a wide range of applications, from cloth simulation to object manipulation. Recent methods using smoothed lagged friction forces have enabled robust and differentiable simulation of elastodynamics with friction. However, the resulting frictional behavior can be inaccurate and may not converge to analytic solutions. Here we evaluate the accuracy of lagged friction models in comparison with implicit frictional contact systems. We show that major inaccuracies near the stick-slip threshold in such systems are caused by lagging of friction forces rather than by smoothing the Coulomb friction curve. Furthermore, we demonstrate how systems involving implicit or lagged friction can be correctly used with higher-order time integration and highlight limitations in earlier attempts. We demonstrate how to exploit forward-mode automatic differentiation to simplify and, in some cases, improve the performance of the inexact Newton method. Finally, we show that other complex phenomena can also be simulated effectively while maintaining smoothness of the entire system. We extend our method to exhibit stick-slip frictional behavior and preserve volume on compressible and nearly-incompressible media using soft constraints.

Implicit Frictional Dynamics with Soft Constraints