Although mesh-based methods are efficient for simulating simple hyperelasticity, maintaining and adapting a mesh-based representation is less appealing in more complex scenarios, e.g. collision, plasticity and fracture. Thus, meshless or point-based methods have enjoyed recent popularity due to their added flexibility in dealing with these situations. Our approach begins with an initial mesh that is either conforming (as generated by one’s favorite meshing algorithm) or non-conforming (e.g. a BCC background lattice). We then propose a framework for embedding arbitrary sample points into this initial mesh allowing for the straightforward handling of collisions, plasticity and fracture without the need for complex remeshing. A straightforward consequence of this new framework is the ability to naturally handle T-junctions alleviating the requirement for a manifold initial mesh. The arbitrarily added embedded points are endowed with full simulation capability allowing them to collide, interact with each other, and interact with the parent geometry in the fashion of a particle-centric simulation system. We demonstrate how this formulation facilitates tasks such as arbitrary refinement or resampling for collision processing, the handling of multiple and possibly conflicting constraints (e.g. when cloth is nonphysically pinched between two objects), the straightforward treatment of fracture, and sub-element resolution of elasticity and plasticity.

@InProceedings{SSIF07,
  author       = "Sifakis, Eftychios and Shinar, Tamar and Irving, Geoffrey and Fedkiw, Ronald",
  title        = "Hybrid Simulation of Deformable Solids",
  booktitle    = "ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA)",
  year         = "2007",
  editor       = "D. Metaxas and J. Popovic",
  url          = "http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2007/SSIF07"
}