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Welcome


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Welcome to the Computer Animation Group at RWTH Aachen University!

The research of the Computer Animation Group focuses on physically-based simulation of rigid body systems, deformable solids, and fluids, collision handling, cutting, fracturing, and real-time simulation methods. The main application areas include virtual prototyping, simulation in engineering, medical simulation, computer games and special effects in movies.

News

Best Paper Award

Our paper "Consistent SPH Rigid-Fluid Coupling" got the best paper award at the Eurographics Vision, Modeling, and Visualization 2023.

Sept. 29, 2023

Implicit Density Projection now available on GitHub!

The code for our paper "Implicit Density Projection for Volume Conserving Liquids" has been implemented in the open source project Mantaflow and is now available on GitHub. Check here for the most recent version.

July 27, 2022

Best Paper Award

Our paper "Fast Corotated Elastic SPH Solids with Implicit Zero-Energy Mode Control" got the best paper award at the ACM SIGGRAPH / EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Computer Animation 2021.

Sept. 10, 2021

Best Paper Award

Our paper "Volume Maps: An Implicit Boundary Representation for SPH" got the best paper award at the ACM SIGGRAPH Motion, Interaction and Games.

Nov. 15, 2019

Best Paper Award

Our paper "A Micropolar Material Model for Turbulent SPH Fluids" got the best paper award at the ACM SIGGRAPH / EUROGRAPHICS Symposium on Computer Animation.

Aug. 15, 2017

SPlisHSPlasH now available on Github!

SPlisHSPlasH is an open-source library for the physically-based simulation of fluids. The simulation in this library is based on the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method which is a popular meshless Lagrangian approach to simulate complex fluid effects. Check it out here!

Nov. 17, 2016

Recent Publications

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Multiphysics Simulation Methods in Computer Graphics

Computer Graphics Forum

Physics simulation is a cornerstone of many computer graphics applications, ranging from video games and virtual reality to visual effects and computational design. The number of techniques for physically-based modeling and animation has thus skyrocketed over the past few decades, facilitating the simulation of a wide variety of materials and physical phenomena. This report captures the state-of-the-art of multiphysics simulation for computer graphics applications. Although a lot of work has focused on simulating individual phenomena, here we put an emphasis on methods developed by the computer graphics community for simulating various physical phenomena and materials, as well as the interactions between them. These include combinations of discretization schemes, mathematical modeling frameworks, and coupling techniques. For the most commonly used methods we provide an overview of the state-of-the-art and deliver valuable insights into the various approaches. A selection of software frameworks that offer out-of-the-box multiphysics modeling capabilities is also presented. Finally, we touch on emerging trends in physics-based animation that affect multiphysics simulation, including machine learning-based methods which have become increasingly popular in recent years.

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A Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics framework for fluid simulation in robotics

Robotics and Autonomous Systems

Simulation is a core component of robotics workflows that can shed light on the complex interplay between a physical body, the environment and sensory feedback mechanisms in silico. To this goal several simulation methods, originating in rigid body dynamics and in continuum mechanics have been employed, enabling the simulation of a plethora of phenomena such as rigid/soft body dynamics, fluid dynamics, muscle simulation as well as sensor and actuator dynamics. The physics engines commonly employed in robotics simulation focus on rigid body dynamics, whereas continuum mechanics methods excel on the simulation of phenomena where deformation plays a crucial role, keeping the two fields relatively separate. Here, we propose a shift of paradigm that allows for the accurate simulation of fluids in interaction with rigid bodies within the same robotics simulation framework, based on the continuum mechanics-based Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics method. The proposed framework is useful for simulations such as swimming robots with complex geometries, robots manipulating fluids and even robots emitting highly viscous materials such as the ones used for 3D printing. Scenarios like swimming on the surface, air-water transitions, locomotion on granular media can be natively simulated within the proposed framework. Firstly, we present the overall architecture of our framework and give examples of a concrete software implementation. We then verify our approach by presenting one of the first of its kind simulation of self-propelled swimming robots with a smooth particle hydrodynamics method and compare our simulations with real experiments. Finally, we propose a new category of simulations that would benefit from this approach and discuss ways that the sim-to-real gap could be further reduced.

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STARK: A Unified Framework for Strongly Coupled Simulation of Rigid and Deformable Bodies with Frictional Contact

2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

The use of simulation in robotics is increasingly widespread for the purpose of testing, synthetic data generation and skill learning. A relevant aspect of simulation for a variety of robot applications is physics-based simulation of robot-object interactions. This involves the challenge of accurately modeling and implementing different mechanical systems such as rigid and deformable bodies as well as their interactions via constraints, contact or friction. Most state-of-the-art physics engines commonly used in robotics either cannot couple deformable and rigid bodies in the same framework, lack important systems such as cloth or shells, have stability issues in complex friction-dominated setups or cannot robustly prevent penetrations. In this paper, we propose a framework for strongly coupled simulation of rigid and deformable bodies with focus on usability, stability, robustness and easy access to state-of-the-art deformation and frictional contact models. Our system uses the Finite Element Method (FEM) to model deformable solids, the Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) approach for frictional contact and a robust second order optimizer to ensure stable and penetration-free solutions to tight tolerances. It is a general purpose framework, not tied to a particular use case such as grasping or learning, it is written in C++ and comes with a Python interface. We demonstrate our system’s ability to reproduce complex real-world experiments where a mobile vacuum robot interacts with a towel on different floor types and towel geometries. Our system is able to reproduce 100% of the qualitative outcomes observed in the laboratory environment. The simulation pipeline, named Stark (the German word for strong, as in strong coupling) is made open-source.

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