Animation of Crack Propagation by means of an Extended Multi-body Solver for the Material Point Method

Published in Computers & Graphics, 2017

Animation of crack propagation

Abstract

We propose a multi-body solver that extends the Material Point Method (MPM) to simulate cracks in computer animation. We define cracks as the intersection between pieces of bodies created by a pre-fracture process and held together by massless particle constraints (glue particles). These pieces are simulated using a MPM multi-body solver extended by us to efficiently handle N-body collisions. Benefits of the present work include (1) low computational overhead compared to a normal MPM algorithm; (2) good scaling in three dimensions due to our use of sparse grids for background computations; (3) allowing for an easy and controllable setup phase to simulate a desired material failure mode, which is especially useful for computer animation.

Recommended citation: Joel Wretborn, Rickard Armiento, Ken Museth. 2017. "Animation of Crack Propagation by Means of an Extended Multi-Body Solver for the Material Point Method." Computers & Graphics 69 (December): 131–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2017.10.005.
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