Real time dynamic fracture with volumetric approximate convex decompositions

Abstract

NVIDIA Figure 1: Destruction of a Roman arena with 1m vertices and 500k faces. The simulation runs at over 30 fps including rigid body simulation, dust simulation and rendering until the end of the sequence where the original mesh is split up into 20k separate pieces. AbstractWe propose a new fast, robust and controllable method to simulate the dynamic destruction of large and complex objects in real time. The common method for fracture simulation in computer games is to pre-fracture models and replace objects by their pre-computed parts at run-time. This popular method is computationally cheap but has the disadvantages that the fracture pattern does not align with the impact location and that the number of hierarchical fracture levels is fixed. Our method allows dynamic fracturing of large objects into an unlimited number of pieces fast enough to be used in computer games. We represent visual meshes by volumetric approximate convex decompositions (VACD) and apply user-defined fracture patterns dependent on the impact location. The method supports partial fracturing meaning that fracture patterns can be applied locally at multiple locations of an object. We propose new methods for computing a VACD, for approximate convex hull construction and for detecting islands in the convex decomposition after partial destruction in order to determine support structures.

Simulation of granular soil behaviour using the Bullet physics library

“…Special motions of bodies and fluids, which are too complex to be manually handled by animators and game developers, can be handled and simulated realistically by physics engines. For example in the scenarios involving explosion, fracture or pouring of liquid on a surface, they play an important role in animations and video games (Bender et al, 2013;Akinci et al, 2012;Müller et al, 2013).…”

Animation of crack propagation by means of an extended multi-body solver for the material point method

“…However, visible artefacts will arise if stresses are not properly aligned to the fracture surface, as the resulting crack will look unrealistic. Müller et al (2013) shows great results combining a pre-computed compound mesh dynamically applied based on the impact location of a projectile, where resulting pieces are simulated by a rigid-body solver.…”

High-resolution brittle fracture simulation with boundary elements

“…Purely geometric methods such as [Su et al 2009;Müller et al 2013] are popular in computer graphics, since they are typically much faster than any simulation. Fractures are either pre-defined during modeling or generated by applying a pre-defined fracture pattern and then updating the topology of the object.…”