Interactive Material Design Using Model Reduction ACM Trans. On Graphics 34(2), 2015

People

• Hongyi Xu
  University of Southern California
• Yijing Li
  University of Southern California
• Yong Chen
  University of Southern California
• Jernej Barbič
  University of Southern California

Project material

• Paper (PDF, 6 Mb)
• Video (Quicktime MP4, 111 Mb)
• SIGGRAPH 2015 presentation slides (zipped PPTX, 160 Mb)
• Laplacian matrix computation code for 3D tet meshes (element-based Laplacian, as used in the paper; zipped C/C++, 0.01 Mb)

Citation

• Hongyi Xu, Yijing Li, Yong Chen, Jernej Barbič:
  Interactive Material Design Using Model Reduction, ACM Trans. On Graphics (TOG) 34(2), 2015. BIBTEX

Abstract

We demonstrate an interactive method to create heterogeneous continuous deformable materials on complex three-dimensional meshes. The user specifies displacements and internal elastic forces at a chosen set of mesh vertices. Our system then rapidly solves an optimization problem to compute a corresponding heterogeneous spatial distribution of material properties, using the Finite Element Method (FEM) analysis. We apply our method to linear and nonlinear isotropic deformable materials. We demonstrate that solving the problem interactively in the full-dimensional space of individual tetrahedron material values is not practical. Instead, we propose a new model reduction method that projects the material space to a low-dimensional space of material modes. Our model reduction accelerates optimization by two orders of magnitude, and makes the convergence much more robust, making it possible to interactively design material distributions on complex meshes. We apply our method to precise control of contact forces and control of pressure over large contact areas between rigid and deformable objects for ergonomics. Our tetrahedron-based dithering method can efficiently convert continuous material distributions into discrete ones and we demonstrate its precision via FEM simulation. We physically display our distributions using haptics, as well as demonstrate how haptics can aid in the material design. The produced heterogeneous material distributions can also be used in computer animation applications.

Comments, questions to Jernej Barbič.

Related projects

• Vega FEM
• Stable Orthotropic Materials

Funding

• NSF (CAREER-1055035, IIS-1422869)
• Sloan Foundation
• USC Annerberg Graduate Fellowship to Hongyi Xu and Yijing Li
• Intel Corporation (donation of two workstations)

Disclaimer

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