Contact Surface Computation for Coarsely Sampled Deformable Objects

We introduce a new collision response scheme that handles collisions between deformable objects with triangulated surfaces. Based on internal forces and penetration depth information, the approach computes the contact surface of interpenetrating objects. In particular, we address discontinuity problems that arise in discrete-time simulations with coarse surface representations. The approach is independent of the actual deformation model and the applied collision detection algorithm, and in contrast to penalty-based collision response schemes, the method does not require any user-defined parameters. We compare the contact surface method to a penalty-based collision response scheme to illustrate the conceptual advantages of the proposed technique.