1. This paper describes a system we have developed for simulating solid deformation and fracture in the real-time setting of a commercial video game such as [The Force Unleashed].
2. Interacting with an environment in any sort of dynamic way can result in arbitrary deformations and fractures, such as throwing a goon through a brick wall or firing a weapon at a wooden door. If you just have one scripted way that things break, then it looks bad. If you want to do a direct, accurate simulation then it’s not going to work in real time. How can we have our cake and eat it too?
3. Divide the scene elements into tetrahedrons, and do an approximate simulation of the deformation on the larger elements, subdividing and creating “splinters” that you can simulate on a large scale. Since we’re just simulating chunks of scenery rather than the lowest particle levels, we can do this fast, in parallel, and then subdivide as needed to get results that look good.
4. In the first level of The Force Unleashed, the player (as Darth Vader) can blast open doors with the force, or pick up wookies and shove them through the same doors. Obviously the player could destroy the door from any number of angles or with many types of damage, and simulating this breakage at the lever of splinter is untenable. The paper’s method provides some pretty good results that have the fine detail we’d expect.
5. Paper video: http://graphics.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/Parker-RTD-2009-08/parker-2009-RTD-video.mov