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. Mass-spring 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.