Joseph Teran

Invertible finite elements for robust simulation of large deformation

We present an algorithm for the finite element simulation of elastoplastic solids which is capable of robustly and efficiently handling arbitrarily large deformation. In fact, our model remains valid even when large parts of the mesh are inverted. The algorithm is straightforward to implement and can be used with any material constitutive model, and for both volumetric solids and thin shells such as cloth. We also provide a mechanism for controlling plastic deformation, which allows a deformable object to be guided towards a desired final shape without sacrificing realistic behavior. Finally, we present an improved method for rigid body collision handling in the context of mixed explicit/implicit time-stepping.

Creating and simulating skeletal muscle from the visible human data set

Simulation of the musculoskeletal system has important applications in biomechanics, biomedical engineering, surgery simulation, and computer graphics. The accuracy of the muscle, bone, and tendon geometry as well as the accuracy of muscle and tendon dynamic deformation are of paramount importance in all these applications. We present a framework for extracting and simulating high resolution musculoskeletal geometry from the segmented visible human data set. We simulate 30 contact/collision coupled muscles in the upper limb and describe a computationally tractable implementation using an embedded mesh framework. Muscle geometry is embedded in a nonmanifold, connectivity preserving simulation mesh molded out of a lower resolution BCC lattice containing identical, well-shaped elements, leading to a relaxed time step restriction for stability and, thus, reduced computational cost. The muscles are endowed with a transversely isotropic, quasiincompressible constitutive model that incorporates muscle fiber fields as well as passive and active components. The simulation takes advantage of a new robust finite element technique that handles both degenerate and inverted tetrahedra.

Efficient elasticity for character skinning with contact and collisions

We present a new algorithm for near-interactive simulation of skeleton driven, high resolution elasticity models. Our methodology is used for soft tissue deformation in character animation. The algorithm is based on a novel discretization of corotational elasticity over a hexahedral lattice. Within this framework we enforce positive definiteness of the stiffness matrix to allow efficient quasistatics and dynamics. In addition, we present a multigrid method that converges with very high efficiency. Our design targets performance through parallelism using a fully vectorized and branch-free SVD algorithm as well as a stable one-point quadrature scheme. Since body collisions, self collisions and soft-constraints are necessary for real-world examples, we present a simple framework for enforcing them. The whole approach is demonstrated in an end-to-end production-level character skinning system.

Robust quasistatic finite elements and flesh simulation

Quasistatic and implicit time integration schemes are typically employed to alleviate the stringent time step restrictions imposed by their explicit counterparts. However, both quasistatic and implicit methods are subject to hidden time step restrictions associated with both the prevention of element inversion and the effects of discontinuous contact forces. Furthermore, although fast iterative solvers typically require a symmetric positive definite global stiffness matrix, a number of factors can lead to indefiniteness such as large jumps in boundary conditions, heavy compression, etc. We present a novel quasistatic algorithm that alleviates geometric and material indefiniteness allowing one to use fast conjugate gradient solvers during Newton-Raphson iteration. Additionally, we robustly compute smooth elastic forces in the presence of highly deformed, inverted elements alleviating artificial time step restrictions typically required to prevent such states. Finally, we propose a novel strategy for treating both collision and self-collision in this context.

A material point method for snow simulation

Snow is a challenging natural phenomenon to visually simulate. While the graphics community has previously considered accumulation and rendering of snow, animation of snow dynamics has not been fully addressed. Additionally, existing techniques for solids and fluids have difficulty producing convincing snow results. Specifically, wet or dense snow that has both solid- and fluid-like properties is difficult to handle. Consequently, this paper presents a novel snow simulation method utilizing a user-controllable elasto-plastic constitutive model integrated with a hybrid Eulerian/Lagrangian Material Point Method. The method is continuum based and its hybrid nature allows us to use a regular Cartesian grid to automate treatment of self-collision and fracture. It also naturally allows us to derive a grid-based semi-implicit integration scheme that has conditioning independent of the number of Lagrangian particles. We demonstrate the power of our method with a variety of snow phenomena including complex character interactions.

A parallel multigrid Poisson solver for fluids simulation on large grids

We present a highly efficient numerical solver for the Poisson equation on irregular voxelized domains supporting an arbitrary mix of Neumann and Dirichlet boundary conditions. Our approach employs a multigrid cycle as a preconditioner for the conjugate gradient method, which enables the use of a lightweight, purely geometric multigrid scheme while drastically improving convergence and robustness on irregular domains. Our method is designed for parallel execution on shared-memory platforms and poses modest requirements in terms of bandwidth and memory footprint. Our solver will accommodate as many as 7682 x 1152 voxels with a memory footprint less than 16 GB, while a full smoke simulation at this resolution fits in 32 GB of RAM. Our preconditioned conjugate gradient solver typically reduces the residual by one order of magnitude every 2 iterations, while each PCG iteration requires approximately 6.1 sec on a 16-core SMP at 7683 resolution. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on animations of smoke flow past solid objects and free surface water animations using Poisson pressure projection at unprecedented resolutions.

Fracturing Rigid Materials

We propose a novel approach to fracturing (and denting) brittle materials. To avoid the computational burden imposed by the stringent time step restrictions of explicit methods or with solving nonlinear systems of equations for implicit methods, we treat the material as a fully rigid body in the limit of infinite stiffness. In addition to a triangulated surface mesh and level set volume for collisions, each rigid body is outfitted with a tetrahedral mesh upon which finite element analysis can be carried out to provide a stress map for fracture criteria. We demonstrate that the commonly used stress criteria can lead to arbitrary fracture (especially for stiff materials) and instead propose the notion of a time averaged stress directly into the FEM analysis. When objects fracture, the virtual node algorithm provides new triangle and tetrahedral meshes in a straightforward and robust fashion. Although each new rigid body can be rasterized to obtain a new level set, small shards can be difficult to accurately resolve. Therefore, we propose a novel collision handling technique for treating both rigid bodies and rigid body thin shells represented by only a triangle mesh

Dynamic simulation of articulated rigid bodies with contact and collision

We propose a novel approach for dynamically simulating articulated rigid bodies undergoing frequent and unpredictable contact and collision. In order to leverage existing algorithms for nonconvex bodies, multiple collisions, large contact groups, stacking, etc., we use maximal rather than generalized coordinates and take an impulse-based approach that allows us to treat articulation, contact, and collision in a unified manner. Traditional constraint handling methods are subject to drift, and we propose a novel prestabilization method that does not require tunable potentially stiff parameters as does Baumgarte stabilization. This differs from poststabilization in that we compute allowable trajectories before moving the rigid bodies to their new positions, instead of correcting them after the fact when it can be difficult to incorporate the effects of contact and collision. A poststabilization technique is used for momentum and angular momentum. Our approach works with any black box method for specifying valid joint constraints and no special considerations are required for arbitrary closed loops or branching. Moreover, our implementation is linear both in the number of bodies and in the number of auxiliary contact and collision constraints, unlike many other methods that are linear in the number of bodies, but not in the number of auxiliary constraints

A second order virtual node method for elliptic problems with interfaces and irregular domains

We present a second order accurate, geometrically flexible and easy to implement method for solving the variable coefficient Poisson equation with interfacial discontinuities or on irregular domains, handling both cases with the same approach. We discretize the equations using an embedded approach on a uniform Cartesian grid employing virtual nodes at interfaces and boundaries. A variational method is used to define numerical stencils near these special virtual nodes and a Lagrange multiplier approach is used to enforce jump conditions and Dirichlet boundary conditions. Our combination of these two aspects yields a symmetric positive definite discretization. In the general case, we obtain the standard 5-point stencil away from the interface. For the specific case of interface problems with continuous coefficients, we present a discontinuity removal technique that admits use of the standard 5-point finite difference stencil everywhere in the domain. Numerical experiments indicate second order accuracy in L^~.

Adaptive physics based tetrahedral mesh generation using level sets

We present a tetrahedral mesh generation algorithm designed for the Lagrangian simulation of deformable bodies. The algorithm’s input is a level set (i.e., a signed distance function on a Cartesian grid or octree). First a bounding box of the object is covered with a uniform lattice of subdivision-invariant tetrahedra. The level set is then used to guide a red green adaptive subdivision procedure that is based on both the local curvature and the proximity to the object boundary. The final topology is carefully chosen so that the connectivity is suitable for large deformation and the mesh approximates the desired shape. Finally, this candidate mesh is compressed to match the object boundary. To maintain element quality during this compression phase we relax the positions of the nodes using finite elements, masses and springs, or an optimization procedure. The resulting mesh is well suited for simulation since it is highly structured, has topology chosen specifically for large deformations, and is readily refined if required during subsequent simulation. We then use this algorithm to generate meshes for the simulation of skeletal muscle from level set representations of the anatomy. The geometric complexity of biological materials makes it very difficult to generate these models procedurally and as a result we obtain most if not all data from an actual human subject. Our current method involves using voxelized data from the Visible Male [1] to create level set representations of muscle and bone geometries. Given this representation, we use simple level set operations to rebuild and repair errors in the segmented data as well as to smooth aliasing inherent in the voxelized data.