Simulation of Collision Deformations

Computer animations and visual effects have always been identified as human timeconsuming tasks, due to the necessity to create a realistic footage from the interpolation of static frames, called key-frames. Recently, Craft Animations has developed a new technique in order to create physics based animations, which by definition have to be realistic, since created from a realistic physical model. In this new framework each object in the scene is not anymore a virtual entity, but a real physical object with its own properties and able to interact with the environment and to be moved interactively by the graphical artists. In this view, each frame is a static key-frame, since it is correct by itself, and no artificial interpolation is needed. Computer animation is now becoming a machine time-consuming task, and thus a physical engine able to efficiently handle the complexity of the scenes must be created from scratch. Following the path of mathematical sciences and engineering, the first natural step has been to implement a rigid body world; the task of this work is to get rid of the rigid assumption and add deformations to our world, in order to do this an efficient collision detection algorithm must also be implemented; the next task will be to add more complicated physics such as fluid dynamics, heat effects and many more.