Precomputing interactive dynamic deformable scenes

Abstract

We present an approach for precomputing data-driven models of interactive physically based deformable scenes. The method permits real-time hardware synthesis of nonlinear deformation dynamics, including self-contact and global illumination effects, and supports real-time user interaction. We use data-driven tabulation of the system's deterministic state space dynamics, and model reduction to build efficient low-rank parameterizations of the deformed shapes. To support runtime interaction, we also tabulate impulse response functions for a palette of external excitations. Although our approach simulates particular systems under very particular interaction conditions, it has several advantages. First, parameterizing all possible scene deformations enables us to precompute novel reduced coparameterizations of global scene illumination for low-frequency lighting conditions. Second, because the deformation dynamics are precomputed and parameterized as a whole, collisions are resolved within the scene during precomputation so that runtime self-collision handling is implicit. Optionally, the data-driven models can be synthesized on programmable graphics hardware, leaving only the low-dimensional state space dynamics and appearance data models to be computed by the main CPU.