Efficient, robust, BEM (Boundary Element Method) based method for simulating articulated 3D elastic object models

This paper proposes an efficient and effective computation method for simulating articulated 3D elastic objects. The articulated elastic object consists of bones, elastic object primitives and joining surfaces. After transforming the bones by inverse kinematics, the elastic object primitives are deformed basically by the BEM (Boundary Element Method). To reduce the computation cost and memory usage and to achieve robust deformations, this paper improves the BEM based module of the conventional method: more specifically, a new method for computing the displacements of the vertices in the joining surfaces. Experimental results show that the proposed model can be simulated 10 times as fast as the conventional model or faster, and that real-time performances such as 60fps can be achieved even for models with 20,000 vertices. High quality simulations of different deformations including expansions and contractions are achieved using character type models.