An animation system for fracturing of rigid objects

This paper describes a system for the animation of fracturing brittle objects. The system combines rigid body simulation methods with a constraint-based model to animate fracturing of arbitrary polyhedral shaped objects under impact. The objects are represented as sets of masses, where pairs of adjacent masses are connected via a distance-preserving linear constraint. Lagrange multipliers are used to compute the forces exerted by those constraints, where these forces determine how and where the object will break. However, a problem with existing systems is that the initial body models exhibit well-defined uniformity, which makes the generated animations unrealistic. This work introduces a method for generating more realistic cracks without any performance loss. This method is easy to implement and applicable on different models. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.