TABLE OF CONTENTS Yan Zhuang, University of California, Berkeley, CA
John Canny, University of California, Berkeley, CA
Real-time simulation and animation of 3D global deformations is the bottleneck of many applications, such as a surgical simulator. In this paper, we present a system that simulates physically realistic large deformations of soft objects in real-time. We achieve the physical realism by modeling the global deformation using geometrically nonlinear finite element methods. We obtain real-time dynamic simulation of models of reasonable complexity by preprocessing the LU-factorization of a small number of large matrices. To reduce the time and space required for such a preprocess, and the time of the back-substitution, we apply modified nested dissection to reorder the finite element mesh. We also introduce an efficient method that handles deformable object collisions with almost no extra cost.
Physically realistic modeling and manipulation of deformable objects has been the bottleneck of many applications, such as human tissue modeling, character animation, surgical simulation, etc. Among the potential applications, a virtual surgical training system is the most demanding for the real-time performance because of the requirement of real-time interaction with virtual human tissue.
In this paper, we address the bottleneck problem of real-time simulation of physically realistic large global deformations of 3D objects. In particular we apply the finite element method (FEM) to model such deformation. By global deformation, we mean deformations, such as large twisting or bending of an object, which involve the entire body, in contrast to poking and squeezing, which involve...
