Interactive continuous collision detection between deformable models using connectivity-based culling

Abstract

We present an interactive algorithm for continuous collision detection between deformable models. We introduce two techniques to improve the culling efficiency and reduce the number of potentially colliding triangle candidate pairs. First, we present a novel formulation for continuous normal cones and use these normal cones to efficiently cull large regions of the mesh from self-collision tests. Second, we exploit the mesh connectivity and introduce the concept of orphan sets to eliminate almost all redundant elementary tests between adjacent triangles. In particular, we can reduce the number of elementary tests by many orders of magnitude. These culling techniques have been combined with bounding volume hierarchies and can result in one order of magnitude performance improvement as compared to prior algorithms for deformable models. We highlight the performance of our algorithm on several benchmarks, including cloth simulations, N-body simulations and breaking objects.