Interactive Simulation of Deformable Bodies on GPUs

We present a mass-spring system for interactive simulation of deformable bodies. For the amount of springs we target, numerical time integration of spring displacements needs to be accelerated and the transfer of displaced point positions for rendering must be avoided. To fulfill these requirements, we exploit features of recent graphics accelerators to simulate spring elongation and compression in the graphics processing unit (GPU), saving displaced point masses in graphics memory, and then sending these positions through the GPU again to render the deformed body. This approach allows for interactive simulation and rendering of about one hundred thousand elements and it enables the display of internal properties of the deformed body. To further increase the physical realism of this simulation, we have integrated volume preservation and additional physics based constraints into the GPU mass-spring system.