Point based animation of elastic, plastic and melting objects

We present a method for modeling and animating a wide spectrum of volumetric objects, with material properties anywhere in the range from stiff elastic to highly plastic. Both the volume and the surface representation are point based, which allows arbitrarily large deviations form the original shape. In contrast to previous point based elasticity in computer graphics, our physical model is derived from continuum mechanics, which allows the specification of common material properties such as Young's Modulus and Poisson's Ratio. In each step, we compute the spatial derivatives of the discrete displacement field using a Moving Least Squares (MLS) procedure. From these derivatives we obtain strains, stresses and elastic forces at each simulated point. We demonstrate how to solve the equations of motion based on these forces, with both explicit and implicit integration schemes. In addition, we propose techniques for modeling and animating a point-sampled surface that dynamically adapts to deformations of the underlying volumetric model.