Complex deformable objects in virtual reality

PubDate: November 2002

Teams: Pusan National University

Writers: Young-Min Kang；Hwangue Cho

PDF: Complex deformable objects in virtual reality

Abstract

In this paper, we present a real-time animation technique for deformable objects based on mass-spring models in virtual reality environments. Many researchers have proposed various techniques for representing the motion and the appearance of deformable objects. However, the animation of deformable objects in virtual reality environments is still a hard problem. One of the most intensively studied deformable objects is virtual cloth. The difficulties in cloth animation mainly lie in the fact that cloth simulation easily tends to become unstable. Although the implicit method can make the simulation stable \citeBaraff98siggraph, it is still impossible to generate interactive animation when the number of mass-points is sufficiently large enough to represent realistic appearance. There have been a few efficient solutions for real-time animation \citeDesbrun99gi,Kang01tvc,Oshita01ca. However, the previous techniques for real-time cloth animation are not capable of generating the plausible motion and appearance because the methods are based on excessive approximations. This paper proposes an efficient technique that can generate realistic animation of complex cloth objects, and the technique makes it possible to integrate realistic deformable objects into the virtual reality systems without violating the interactivity of the system. The proposed method is based on the implicit integration in order to keep the system stable, and the solution of the linear system involved in the implicit integration is efficiently approximated in real-time.