Physics-based Human Neck Simulation

In deformable character animation, the skin deformation of the neck is important to reproduce believable facial animation. The neck also plays an important role in supporting the head in balance while generating the controlled head movements that are essential to many aspects of human behavior. However, neck animation is largely overlooked both in computer graphics and animation due to the complexity of the cervical anatomy. This paper presents a physical human neck model based on biomechanical modeling. Relevant anatomical structures part of a 3D model of the human musculoskeletal system are modeled as deformable or linked rigid bodies. We couple the soft-hard bodies using soft constraints via elastic springs and form a Lagrangian dynamic system. The simulation of dynamic skin deformation is achieved by automatically binding the skin vertices to underlying bodies in an anatomically correct manner. Experimental results are provided and show the high level of realism that our model offers. In addition, the simulation runs at interactive rates on a modern computer.