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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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Implicit Surface Tension for SPH Fluid Simulation

ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)

The numerical simulation of surface tension is an active area of research in many different fields of application and has been attempted using a wide range of methods. Our contribution is the derivation and implementation of an implicit cohesion force based approach for the simulation of surface tension effects using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method. We define a continuous formulation inspired by the properties of surface tension at the molecular scale which is spatially discretized using SPH. An adapted variant of the linearized backward Euler method is used for time discretization, which we also strongly couple with an implicit viscosity model. Finally, we extend our formulation with adhesion forces for interfaces with rigid objects. Existing SPH approaches for surface tension in computer graphics are mostly based on explicit time integration, thereby lacking in stability for challenging settings. We compare our implicit surface tension method to these approaches and further evaluate our model on a wider variety of complex scenarios, showcasing its efficacy and versatility. Among others, these include but are not limited to simulations of a water crown, a dripping faucet and a droplet-toy. Paper (ACM, Free of Charge)

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Micropolar Elasticity in Physically-Based Animation

Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SCA)

We explore micropolar materials for the simulation of volumetric deformable solids. In graphics, micropolar models have only been used in the form of one-dimensional Cosserat rods, where a rotating frame is attached to each material point on the one-dimensional centerline. By carrying this idea over to volumetric solids, every material point is associated with a microrotation, an independent degree of freedom that can be coupled to the displacement through a material's strain energy density. The additional degrees of freedom give us more control over bending and torsion modes of a material. We propose a new orthotropic micropolar curvature energy that allows us to make materials stiff to bending in specific directions. For the simulation of dynamic micropolar deformables we propose a novel incremental potential formulation with a consistent FEM discretization that is well suited for the use in physically-based animation. This allows us to easily couple micropolar deformables with dynamic collisions through a contact model inspired from the Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) approach. For the spatial discretization with FEM we discuss the challenges related to the rotational degrees of freedom and propose a scheme based on the interpolation of angular velocities followed by quaternion time integration at the quadrature points. In our evaluation we validate the consistency and accuracy of our discretization approach and demonstrate several compelling use cases for micropolar materials. This includes explicit control over bending and torsion stiffness, deformation through prescription of a volumetric curvature field and robust interaction of micropolar deformables with dynamic collisions.

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A comparison of linear consistent correction methods for first-order SPH derivatives

Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SCA)

A well-known issue with the widely used Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method is the neighborhood deficiency. Near the surface, the SPH interpolant fails to accurately capture the underlying fields due to a lack of neighboring particles. These errors may introduce ghost forces or other visual artifacts into the simulation. In this work we investigate three different popular methods to correct the first-order spatial derivative SPH operators up to linear accuracy, namely the Kernel Gradient Correction (KGC), Moving Least Squares (MLS) and Reproducing Kernel Particle Method (RKPM). We provide a thorough, theoretical comparison in which we remark strong resemblance between the aforementioned methods. We support this by an analysis using synthetic test scenarios. Additionally, we apply the correction methods in simulations with boundary handling, viscosity, surface tension, vorticity and elastic solids to showcase the reduction or elimination of common numerical artifacts like ghost forces. Lastly, we show that incorporating the correction algorithms in a state-of-the-art SPH solver only incurs a negligible reduction in computational performance.

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