Fast simulation of deformable characters with articulated skeletons in projective dynamics

Abstract

We propose a fast and robust solver to simulate continuum-based deformable models with constraints, in particular, rigid-body and joint constraints useful for soft articulated characters. Our method embeds degrees of freedom of both articulated rigid bodies and deformable bodies in one unified optimization problem, thus coupling the deformable and rigid bodies. Our method can efficiently simulate character models, with rigid-body parts (bones) being correctly coupled with deformable parts (flesh). Our method is stable because backward Euler time integration is applied to rigid as well as deformable degrees of freedom. Our method is rigorously derived from constrained Newtonian mechanics. In an example simulation with rigid bodies only, we demonstrate that our method converges to the same motion as classical explicitly integrated rigid body simulator.