Modeling and animation of brittle fracture in three dimensions

This thesis describes a system for simulating fracture in 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 by a distance-preserving linear constraint. The movement of the objects is normally realized by unconstrained rigid body dynamics. The fracture calculations are only done at discrete collision events. In case of an impact, the forces acting on the constraints are calculated. These forces determine how and where the object will break. The problem with most of the existing fracture systems is that they only allow simulations to be done offline, either because the utilized techniques are computationally expensive or they require many small steps for accuracy. This work presents a near-real-time solution to the problem of brittle fracture and a graphical user interface to create realistic animations.