Real-Time Deformation and Fracture in a Game Environment
(my choice)
Sentence
The goal of this paper is to describe how components based on corotational tetrahedral finite element method can be combined to produce an engine that is robust to unpredictable user interactions, fast enough to model reasonable scenarios at real-time speeds, suitable for use in the design of a game level, and with appropriate controls allowing content creators to match artistic direction. (Lines 3-6 in the abstract)
Problem
Current literature doesn’t talk about design and implementation ideas/issues for real time simulation of solid deformation and fracture, especially in a game context.
Key Idea
Using corotational tetrahedral finite element formulation for the objects in the scence with a sleuth of optimizations such as breaking meshes into islands (for parallelism) and then nodes (for cache consistency); the fracture design uses splinters (pieces of one or more tetrahedral elements) that gives the artist control over the appearance of an object as it breaks; their collision detection implementation sacrifices accuracy for speed and stability; uses threads for high parallelism
What the paper lets you do
Create realistic real-time deformations/fractures in games, that can be tweaked by artists with a focus on parallelism and robustness.
What it could be used for
Already used in StarWars X-box game; more games can make use of it for realistic and real-time deformations and fractures.
Might not be useful in real life testing, since a lot of time and space optimizations have been made
Other materials
Project webpage, Video