Real-time Global Deformations∗

Real-time simulation and animation of 3D global deformations is the bottleneck of many applications, such as surgical simulator. In this paper, we present a system that simulates physically realistic large deformations of soft objects in real-time. We achieve the physical realism by modeling the global deformation using geometrically nonlinear finite element methods. We achieve real-time dynamic simulation of models of reasonable complexity by preprocessing the LUfactorization of a small number of large matrices. To reduce the time and space required for such a preprocess, and the time of the back-substitution, we apply modified nested dissection to reorder the finite element mesh. We also introduce an efficient method that handles deformable object collisions with almost no extra cost.