VIPER: Volume Invariant Position-based Elastic Rods
Abstract
We extend the formulation of position-based rods to include elastic volumetric deformations. We achieve this by introducing an additional degree of freedom per vertex -- isotropic scale (and its velocity). Including scale enriches the space of possible deformations, allowing the simulation of volumetric effects, such as a reduction in cross-sectional area when a rod is stretched. We rigorously derive the continuous formulation of its elastic energy potentials, and hence its associated position-based dynamics (PBD) updates to realize this model, enabling the simulation of up to 26000 DOFs at 140 Hz in our GPU implementation. We further show how rods can provide a compact alternative to tetrahedral meshes for the representation of complex muscle deformations, as well as providing a convenient representation for collision detection. This is achieved by modeling a muscle as a bundle of rods, for which we also introduce a technique to automatically convert a muscle surface mesh into a rods-bundle. Finally, we show how rods and/or bundles can be skinned to a surface mesh to drive its deformation, resulting in an alternative to cages for real-time volumetric deformation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1906.05260,
title = {VIPER: Volume Invariant Position-based Elastic Rods},
author = {Baptiste Angles and Daniel Rebain and Miles Macklin and Brian Wyvill and Loic Barthe and JP Lewis and Javier von der Pahlen and Shahram Izadi and Julien Valentin and Sofien Bouaziz and Andrea Tagliasacchi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.05260},
year = {2019}
}