GETTING SANDY: CREATING COLLAPSING SAND EFFECTS FOR \u3ci\u3eAN ODE TO LOVE\u3c/i\u3e

This thesis presents an artistic approach of creating collapsing sand effects in Brown Bag Films\u27 animated short, An Ode To Love, directed by Matthew Darragh. A combination of rigid body simulation and fluid simulation tools, which are available in Houdini 3D animation software version 13, was used to successfully complete the task. A detailed design and implementation process to achieve the effects is documented in this work

A practical method for animating anisotropic elastoplastic materials

This paper introduces a simple method for simulating highly anisotropic elastoplastic material behaviors like the dissolution of fibrous phenomena (splintering wood, shredding bales of hay) and materials composed of large numbers of irregularly‐shaped bodies (piles of twigs, pencils, or cards). We introduce a simple transformation of the anisotropic problem into an equivalent isotropic one, and we solve this new “fictitious” isotropic problem using an existing simulator based on the material point method. Our approach results in minimal changes to existing simulators, and it allows us to re‐use popular isotropic plasticity models like the Drucker‐Prager yield criterion instead of inventing new anisotropic plasticity models for every phenomenon we wish to simulate

Multiphase SPH simulation for interactive fluids and solids

This work extends existing multiphase-fluid SPH frameworks to cover solid phases, including deformable bodies and granular materials. In our extended multiphase SPH framework, the distribution and shapes of all phases, both fluids and solids, are uniformly represented by their volume fraction functions. The dynamics of the multiphase system is governed by conservation of mass and momentum within different phases. The behavior of individual phases and the interactions between them are represented by corresponding constitutive laws, which are functions of the volume fraction fields and the velocity fields. Our generalized multiphase SPH framework does not require separate equations for specific phases or tedious interface tracking. As the distribution, shape and motion of each phase is represented and resolved in the same way, the proposed approach is robust, efficient and easy to implement. Various simulation results are presented to demonstrate the capabilities of our new multiphase SPH framework, including deformable bodies, granular materials, interaction between multiple fluids and deformable solids, flow in porous media, and dissolution of deformable solids

A Divergence‐free Mixture Model for Multiphase Fluids

We present a novel divergence free mixture model for multiphase flows and the related fluid-solid coupling. The new mixture model is built upon a volume-weighted mixture velocity so that the divergence free condition is satisfied for miscible and immiscible multiphase fluids. The proposed mixture velocity can be solved efficiently by adapted single phase incompressible solvers, allowing for larger time steps and smaller volume deviations. Besides, the drift velocity formulation is corrected to ensure mass conservation during the simulation. The new approach increases the accuracy of multiphase fluid simulation by several orders. The capability of the new divergence-free mixture model is demonstrated by simulating different multiphase flow phenomena including mixing and unmixing of multiple fluids, fluid-solid coupling involving deformable solids and granular materials

A moving least square reproducing kernel particle method for unified multiphase continuum simulation

In physically based-based animation, pure particle methods are popular due to their simple data structure, easy implementation, and convenient parallelization. As a pure particle-based method and using Galerkin discretization, the Moving Least Square Reproducing Kernel Method (MLSRK) was developed in engineering computation as a general numerical tool for solving PDEs. The basic idea of Moving Least Square (MLS) has also been used in computer graphics to estimate deformation gradient for deformable solids. Based on these previous studies, we propose a multiphase MLSRK framework that animates complex and coupled fluids and solids in a unified manner. Specifically, we use the Cauchy momentum equation and phase field model to uniformly capture the momentum balance and phase evolution/interaction in a multiphase system, and systematically formulate the MLSRK discretization to support general multiphase constitutive models. A series of animation examples are presented to demonstrate the performance of our new multiphase MLSRK framework, including hyperelastic, elastoplastic, viscous, fracturing and multiphase coupling behaviours etc

A Unified Particle System Framework for Multi-Phase, Multi-Material Visual Simulations

We introduce a unified particle framework which integrates the phase-field method with multi-material simulation to allow modeling of both liquids and solids, as well as phase transitions between them. A simple elasto-plastic model is used to capture the behavior of various kinds of solids, including deformable bodies, granular materials, and cohesive soils. States of matter or phases, particularly liquids and solids, are modeled using the non-conservative Allen-Cahn equation. In contrast, materials---made of different substances---are advected by the conservative Cahn-Hilliard equation. The distributions of phases and materials are represented by a phase variable and a concentration variable, respectively, allowing us to represent commonly observed fluid-solid interactions. Our multi-phase, multi-material system is governed by a unified Helmholtz free energy density. This framework provides the first method in computer graphics capable of modeling a continuous interface between phases. It is versatile and can be readily used in many scenarios that are challenging to simulate. Examples are provided to demonstrate the capabilities and effectiveness of this approach

ChainQueen: A Real-Time Differentiable Physical Simulator for Soft Robotics

Physical simulators have been widely used in robot planning and control. Among them, differentiable simulators are particularly favored, as they can be incorporated into gradient-based optimization algorithms that are efficient in solving inverse problems such as optimal control and motion planning. Simulating deformable objects is, however, more challenging compared to rigid body dynamics. The underlying physical laws of deformable objects are more complex, and the resulting systems have orders of magnitude more degrees of freedom and therefore they are significantly more computationally expensive to simulate. Computing gradients with respect to physical design or controller parameters is typically even more computationally challenging. In this paper, we propose a real-time, differentiable hybrid Lagrangian-Eulerian physical simulator for deformable objects, ChainQueen, based on the Moving Least Squares Material Point Method (MLS-MPM). MLS-MPM can simulate deformable objects including contact and can be seamlessly incorporated into inference, control and co-design systems. We demonstrate that our simulator achieves high precision in both forward simulation and backward gradient computation. We have successfully employed it in a diverse set of control tasks for soft robots, including problems with nearly 3,000 decision variables.Comment: In submission to ICRA 2019. Supplemental Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IWD4iGIsB4 Project Page: https://github.com/yuanming-hu/ChainQuee

Physically Based Animation of sea Anemones in Real-Time

This paper presents a technique for modeling and animating fiberlike objects such as sea anemones tentacles in real-time. Each fiber is described by a generalized cylinder defined around an articulated skeleton. The dynamics of each individual fiber is controlled by a physically based simulation that updates the position of the skeleton’s frames over time. We take into account the forces generated by the surrounding fluid as well as a stiffness function describing the bending behavior of the fiber. High level control of the animation is achieved through the use of four types of singularities to describe the three-dimensional continuous velocity field representing the fluid. We thus animate hundreds of fibers by key-framing only a small number of singularities. We apply this algorithm on a seascape composed of many sea anemones. We also show that our algorithm is more general and can be applied to other types of objects composed of fibers such as seagrasse