Animation of crack propagation by means of an extended multi-body solver for the material point method

We propose a multi-body solver that extends the Material Point Method (MPM) to simulate cracks in computer animation. We define cracks as the intersection between pieces of bodies created by a pre-fracture process and held together by massless particle constraints (glue particles). These pieces are simulated using a MPM multi-body solver extended by us to efficiently handle N-body collisions. Benefits of the present work include (1) low computational overhead compared to a normal MPM algorithm; (2) good scaling in three dimensions due to our use of sparse grids for background computations; (3) allowing for an easy and controllable setup phase to simulate a desired material failure mode, which is especially useful for computer animation. Accepted manuscript version. Formal publication in Computers & Graphics 69, 131 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2017.10.005 © 2017. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/