Silcowitz, MortenNiebe, SarahErleben, KennyHartmut Prautzsch and Alfred Schmitt and Jan Bender and Matthias Teschner2014-02-012014-02-012009978-3-905673-73-9https://doi.org/10.2312/PE/vriphys/vriphys09/105-114In interactive physical simulation, contact forces are applied to prevent rigid bodies from penetrating each other. Accurate contact force determination is a computationally hard problem. Thus, in practice one trades accuracy for performance. The result is visual artifacts such as viscous or damped contact response. In this paper, we present a new approach to contact force determination. We reformulate the contact force problem as a nonlinear root search problem, using a Fischer function. We solve this problem using a generalized Newton method. Our new Fischer - Newton method shows improved qualities for specific configurations where the most widespread alternative, the Projected Gauss-Seidel method, fails. Experiments show superior convergence properties of the exact Fischer - Newton method.Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.5 [Computer Graphics]: Physically based modeling I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: Animation G.1.6 [Mathematics of Computing ]: Nonlinear programming Keywords: Contact Force Problem, Complementarity Formulation, Newton Method, Fischer Function