Fracture Animation Procedure Using Crack Patterns Generated by L-System

Abstract

In this study, an empirical approach toward visually convincing fracture animation is considered for entertainment purposes. We aim to achieve a real-time fracture animation where the user can directly specify the possible geometry of cracks, but the resulting geometry of fragments is realistic. Our procedure comprises four main tasks: generating a crack pattern on a two-dimensional object through the L-system and the Turtle graphics concept, detecting the shape of fragments by the angle-prioritized depth-first search (AP-DFS), and then classifying it by the compression and classification (CC) procedure, and finally generating three-dimensional objects by sweeping. In the first task, the L-system controls topological complexity, such as the number of branches and how frequent a specified pattern can appear, and the Turtle graphics parameters control geometric complexity, such as the distribution of cracks. A rigid body dynamics simulator has been developed, implementing the above procedure to prepare objects for fracture animation. Through the verification by the rigid body dynamics simulator, we confirmed that the developed application could be used for a new fracture animation procedure based on tailored crack patterns.