A Simple Method for Real-Time Metal Shell Simulation

Realistic animation and rendering of the metal shell is an important aspect for movies, video games and other simulators. Usually this is handled by FEMmethod, which requires extremely high computational cost due to solving the stiffness matrix. We now propose a trick that could smartly avoid the large scale computation required by FEM, and could still generate visually convincing images of metal shell. We do so by first partitioning the shell into k rigid sub-shells that evolve independently during impact, before using a simple spring-mass model is applied between each adjacent vertex to retain continuity of the shell. This technique could produce realistically looking deformed rigid shells in real-time and can easily be integrated in any game engine and physics engine.