Real-Time Deformation and Fracture in a Game Environment

Assigned Paper: Found on authors website here

1. Sentence:  This paper describes a simulation system that has been developed to model the deformation and fracture of solid objects in a real-time gaming context.
2. Problem:  Traditional animations of explosions and other fragmented destructions require too much time to be used in real-time scenarios. Instead use a reduced set of easily manageable chunks to represent the entire object and perform the simulations on this collection of pieces.
3. Key Idea:  Describe the object to be fractured as a finite set of tetrahedral elements for use in the physical calculations, while assigning splinters of the original mesh to said elements to preserve realism.
4. Application: Provides a technique for destroying objects under real-time constraints, especially those in a game environment. Shown examples of users destroying the environment including objects of multiple different materials, for which specific properties of the material generated very different effects. Demonstrated non-destructive examples of coiling rope on a spindle.
5. Usefulness:  The ability of the technique to model physical interactions through coarse chunks, yet still preserving the fine details of the breakdown, could be used to model destruction for movie special effects. Additionally, as the system is highly versatile with material properties, this method could be integrated into general purpose physics simulators for classroom examples and training.
6. Other Materials:  Video on paper’s web page