Non-manifold Level Sets: A multivalued implicit surface representation with applications to self-collision processing
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia Proceedings) — nov 2015
Level sets have been established as highly versatile implicit surface
representations, with widespread use in graphics applications in-
cluding modeling and dynamic simulation. Nevertheless, level sets
are often presumed to be limited, compared to explicit meshes, in
their ability to represent domains with thin topological features (e.g.
narrow slits and gaps) or, even worse, material overlap. Geometries
with such features may arise from modeling tools that tolerate oc-
casional self-intersections, fracture modeling algorithms that create
narrow or zero-width cuts by design, or as transient states in collision processing pipelines for deformable objects. Converting such
models to level sets can alter their topology if thin features are not
resolved by the grid size. We argue that this ostensible limitation
is not an inherent defect of the implicit surface concept, but a col-
lateral consequence of the standard Cartesian lattice used to store
the level set values. We propose storing signed distance values on a
regular hexahedral mesh which can have multiple collocated cubic
elements and non-manifold bifurcation to accommodate non-trivial
topology. We show how such non-manifold level sets can be sys-
tematically generated from convenient alternative geometric rep-
resentations. Finally we demonstrate how this representation can
facilitate fast and robust treatment of self-collision in simulations
of volumetric elastic deformable bodies.
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BibTex references
@InProceedings{MASS15, author = "Mitchell, Nathan and Aanjaneya, Mridul and Setaluri, Rajsekhar and Sifakis, Eftychios", title = "Non-manifold Level Sets: A multivalued implicit surface representation with applications to self-collision processing", booktitle = "ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH Asia Proceedings)", month = "nov", year = "2015", publisher = "ACM Press", projecturl = "http://nathanmitchell.graphics/publications/nonmanifold_levelsets", url = "http://graphics.cs.wisc.edu/Papers/2015/MASS15" }