Real-time animation technique for flexible and thin objects

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an efficient technique for the animation of flexible thin objects. Massspring model was employed to represent the flexible objects. Many techniques have used the mass-spring model to generate plausible animation of soft objects. The easiest approach to animation with mass-spring model is explicit Euler method, but the explicit Euler method has serious disadvantage that it suffers from `instability problem'. The implicit integration method is a possible solution to overcome the instability problem. However, the most critical flaw of the implicit method is that it involves a large linear system. This paper presents a fast animation technique for mass-spring model with approximated implicit method. The proposed technique stably updates the state of n mass-points in O(n) time when the number of total springs are O(n). We also consider the interaction of the flexible object and air in order to generate plausible results. Keywords: flexible object, mass-spring model, implicit method, stability 1