Physics-Inspired Adaptive Fracture Refinement

Physically based animation of detailed fracture effects is not only computationally expensive, but also difficult to implement due to numerical instability. In this paper, we propose a physics-inspired approach to enrich low-resolution fracture animation by realistic fracture details. Given a custom-designed material strength field, we adaptively refine a coarse fracture surface into a detailed one, based on a discrete gradient descent flow. Using the new fracture surface, we then generate a high-resolution fracture animation with details on both the fracture surface and the exterior surface. Our experiment shows that this approach is simple, fast, and friendly to user design and control. It can generate realistic fracture animations within a few seconds.

ACM Trans. Graph. (SIGGRAPH), 33(4)