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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Flexible Motion Optimization with Modulated Assistive Forces
    (ACM, 2021) Kim, Nam Hee; Ling, Hung Yu; Xie, Zhaoming; Panne, Michiel Van De; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
    Animated motions should be simple to direct while also being plausible. We present a flexible keyframe-based character animation system that generates plausible simulated motions for both physically-feasible and physically-infeasible motion specifications. We introduce a novel control parameterization, optimizing over internal actions, external assistive-force modulation, and keyframe timing. Our method allows for emergent behaviors between keyframes, does not require advance knowledge of contacts or exact motion timing, supports the creation of physically impossible motions, and allows for near-interactive motion creation. The use of a shooting method allows for the use of any black-box simulator. We present results for a variety of 2D and 3D characters and motions, using sparse and dense keyframes. We compare our control parameterization scheme against other possible approaches for incorporating external assistive forces.
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    Visual Simulation of Soil-Structure Destruction with Seepage Flows
    (ACM, 2021) Wang, Xu; Fujisawa, Makoto; Mikawa, Masahiko; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
    This paper introduces a method for simulating soil-structure coupling with water, which involves a series of visual effects, including wet granular materials, seepage flows, capillary action between grains, and dam breaking simulation.We develop a seepage flow based SPH-DEM framework to handle soil and water particles interactions through a momentum exchange term. In this framework, water is seen as a seepage flow through porous media by Darcy's law; the seepage rate and the soil permeability are manipulated according to drag coefficient and soil porosity. A water saturation-based capillary model is used to capture various soil behaviors such as sandy soil and clay soil. Furthermore, the capillary model can dynamically adjust liquid bridge forces induced by surface tension between soil particles. The adhesion model describes the attraction ability between soil surfaces and water particles to achieve various visual effects for soil and water. Lastly, this framework can capture the complicated dam-breaking scenarios caused by overtopping flow or internal seepage erosion that are challenging to simulate.
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    A GAN-Like Approach for Physics-Based Imitation Learning and Interactive Control
    (ACM, 2021) Xu, Pei; Karamouzas, Ioannis; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
    We present a simple and intuitive approach for interactive control of physically simulated characters. Our work builds upon generative adversarial networks (GAN) and reinforcement learning, and introduces an imitation learning framework where an ensemble of classifiers and an imitation policy are trained in tandem given pre-processed reference clips. The classifiers are trained to discriminate the reference motion from the motion generated by the imitation policy, while the policy is rewarded for fooling the discriminators. Using our GAN-like approach, multiple motor control policies can be trained separately to imitate different behaviors. In runtime, our system can respond to external control signal provided by the user and interactively switch between different policies. Compared to existing method, our proposed approach has the following attractive properties: 1) achieves state-of-the-art imitation performance without manually designing and fine tuning a reward function; 2) directly controls the character without having to track any target reference pose explicitly or implicitly through a phase state; and 3) supports interactive policy switching without requiring any motion generation or motion matching mechanism. We highlight the applicability of our approach in a range of imitation and interactive control tasks, while also demonstrating its ability to withstand external perturbations as well as to recover balance. Overall, our approach has low runtime cost and can be easily integrated into interactive applications and games.
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    Efficient acoustic perception for virtual AI agents
    (ACM, 2021) Chemistruck, Mike; Allen, Andrew; Snyder, John; Raghuvanshi, Nikunj; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
    We model acoustic perception in AI agents efficiently within complex scenes with many sound events. The key idea is to employ perceptual parameters that capture how each sound event propagates through the scene to the agent's location. This naturally conforms virtual perception to human. We propose a simplified auditory masking model that limits localization capability in the presence of distracting sounds. We show that anisotropic reflections as well as the initial sound serve as useful localization cues. Our system is simple, fast, and modular and obtains natural results in our tests, letting agents navigate through passageways and portals by sound alone, and anticipate or track occluded but audible targets. Source code is provided.
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    Neural UpFlow: A Scene Flow Learning Approach to Increase the Apparent Resolution of Particle-Based Liquids
    (ACM, 2021) Roy, Bruno; Poulin, Pierre; Paquette, Eric; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
    We present a novel up-resing technique for generating high-resolution liquids based on scene flow estimation using deep neural networks. Our approach infers and synthesizes small- and large-scale details solely from a low-resolution particle-based liquid simulation. The proposed network leverages neighborhood contributions to encode inherent liquid properties throughout convolutions. We also propose a particle-based approach to interpolate between liquids generated from varying simulation discretizations using a state-of-the-art bidirectional optical flow solver method for fluids in addition with a novel key-event topological alignment constraint. In conjunction with the neighborhood contributions, our loss formulation allows the inference model throughout epochs to reward important differences in regard to significant gaps in simulation discretizations. Even when applied in an untested simulation setup, our approach is able to generate plausible high-resolution details. Using this interpolation approach and the predicted displacements, our approach combines the input liquid properties with the predicted motion to infer semi-Lagrangian advection. We furthermore showcase how the proposed interpolation approach can facilitate generating large simulation datasets with a subset of initial condition parameters.
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    Fast Corotated Elastic SPH Solids with Implicit Zero-Energy Mode Control
    (ACM, 2021) Kugelstadt, Tassilo; Bender, Jan; Fernández-Fernández, José Antonio; Jeske, Stefan Rhys; Löschner, Fabian; Longva, Andreas; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
    We develop a new operator splitting formulation for the simulation of corotated linearly elastic solids with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). Based on the technique of Kugelstadt et al. [2018] originally developed for the Finite Element Method (FEM), we split the elastic energy into two separate terms corresponding to stretching and volume conservation, and based on this principle, we design a splitting scheme compatible with SPH. The operator splitting scheme enables us to treat the two terms separately, and because the stretching forces lead to a stiffness matrix that is constant in time, we are able to prefactor the system matrix for the implicit integration step. Solid-solid contact and fluid-solid interaction is achieved through a unified pressure solve. We demonstrate more than an order of magnitude improvement in computation time compared to a state-of-the-art SPH simulator for elastic solids. We further improve the stability and reliability of the simulation through several additional contributions. We introduce a new implicit penalty mechanism that suppresses zero-energy modes inherent in the SPH formulation for elastic solids, and present a new, physics-inspired sampling algorithm for generating highquality particle distributions for the rest shape of an elastic solid. We finally also devise an efficient method for interpolating vertex positions of a high-resolution surface mesh based on the SPH particle positions for use in high-fidelity visualization.
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    Coupling Friction with Visual Appearance
    (ACM, 2021) Andrews, Sheldon; Nassif, Loic; Erleben, Kenny; Kry, Paul G.; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
    We present a novel meso-scale model for computing anisotropic and asymmetric friction for contacts in rigid body simulations that is based on surface facet orientations. The main idea behind our approach is to compute a direction dependent friction coefficient that is determined by an object's roughness. Specifically, where the friction is dependent on asperity interlocking, but at a scale where surface roughness is also a visual characteristic of the surface. A GPU rendering pipeline is employed to rasterize surfaces using a shallow depth orthographic projection at each contact point in order to sample facet normal information from both surfaces, which we then combine to produce direction dependent friction coefficients that can be directly used in typical LCP contact solvers, such as the projected Gauss-Seidel method. We demonstrate our approach with a variety of rough textures, where the roughness is both visible in the rendering and in the motion produced by the physical simulation.
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    Volume Preserving Simulation of Soft Tissue with Skin
    (ACM, 2021) Sheen, Seung Heon; Larionov, Egor; Pai, Dinesh K.; Narain, Rahul and Neff, Michael and Zordan, Victor
    Simulation of human soft tissues in contact with their environment is essential in many fields, including visual effects and apparel design. Biological tissues are nearly incompressible. However, standard methods employ compressible elasticity models and achieve incompressibility indirectly by setting Poisson's ratio to be close to 0.5. This approach can produce results that are plausible qualitatively but inaccurate quantatively. This approach also causes numerical instabilities and locking in coarse discretizations or otherwise poses a prohibitive restriction on the size of the time step. We propose a novel approach to alleviate these issues by replacing indirect volume preservation using Poisson's ratios with direct enforcement of zonal volume constraints, while controlling fine-scale volumetric deformation through a cell-wise compression penalty. To increase realism, we propose an epidermis model to mimic the dramatically higher surface stiffness on real skinned bodies. We demonstrate that our method produces stable realistic deformations with precise volume preservation but without locking artifacts. Due to the volume preservation not being tied to mesh discretization, our method also allows a resolution consistent simulation of incompressible materials. Our method improves the stability of the standard neo-Hookean model and the general compression recovery in the Stable neo-Hookean model.