Miguel A. Otaduy: Research

Contact and Deformations

Robust approaches to contact dynamics formulate contact handling as a constrained optimization problem. For deformable objects with many degrees of freedom and many contacts, such approaches have been traditionally considered as impractical. However, the design of nested iterative solvers for both the deformations and the contact forces leads to robust yet efficient contact handling of deformable objects [→].

Some common deformable objects, such as human flesh, can be modeled as a rigid core surrounded by a layer of soft tissue. Under that assumption, the computation of dynamic deformations with contact can be simplified through a formulation that exploits a rigid core [→] or an articulated core [→]. The definition of deformations in a layer of soft tissue also allows for the computation of dynamics on 2D textures in graphics hardware [→].

Another way to optimize the simulation of deformations is to focus the degrees of freedom only where necessary, using adaptive simulation. One possible way of devising an adaptive simulation of deformations is the use of multigrid methods [→]. Adaptive simulation can also be incorporated to geometrically inspired shape-matching deformation methods, which trade some physical realism for increased robustness and efficiency [→].

The classical way to achieve highly realistic behavior in physically-based simulation of deformations is to design a sufficiently rich constitutive model of the material, and then finely tune the parameters of this model. This complex modeling procedure can be largely simplified by capturing several deformation samples, fitting a simple linear material model to each sample, and then modeling non-linear heterogeneous material behavior by interpolating the linear materials [→]. Example-based materials can also be exploited to obtain pose-dependent dynamic behavior desired by an artist in computer animation [→].

Students: Javier Zurdo [→], Álvaro Pérez [→].

Collaborators: Nico Galoppo (Intel) [→], Denis Steinemann (VirtaMed) [→], Bernd Bickel (ETH Zurich) [→], Markus Gross (ETH Zurich) [→], Ming Lin (UNC) [→], Rasmus Tamstorf (Disney Animation), Stephane Redon (INRIA) [→], Hanspeter Pfister (Harvard) [→], Wojciech Matusik (Adobe) [→].