Fast Simulation of
Skeleton-Driven Deformable Body Characters


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Abstract

dancing fatman

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We propose a fast physically based simulation system for skeleton-driven deformable body characters. Our system can generate realistic motions of self-propelled deformable body characters by considering the two-way interactions among the skeleton, the deformable body, and the environment in the dynamic simulation. It can also compute the passive jiggling behavior of a deformable body driven by a kinematic skeletal motion. We show that a well-coordinated combination of (1) a reduced deformable body model with nonlinear finite elements, (2) a linear-time algorithm for skeleton dynamics, and (3) explicit integration can boost simulation speed to orders of magnitude faster than existing methods, while preserving modeling accuracy as much as possible. Parallel computation on the GPU has also been implemented to obtain an additional speedup for complicated characters. Detailed discussions of our engineering decisions for speed and accuracy of the simulation system are presented in the paper. We tested our approach with a variety of skeleton-driven deformable body characters, and the tested characters were simulated in real-time or near real-time.

Citation

Junggon Kim and Nancy S. Pollard, Fast Simulation of Skeleton-driven Deformable Body Characters, ACM Transactions on Graphics, Volume 30, Issue 5, 2011.

Links

Related project

Check the following project to see how to control the self-propelling characters such as the starfish and the fish.

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