An Animation System for Fracturing of Rigid Objects

This paper describes a system for the animation of fracturing of 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 each two masses are connected via a distance-preserving linear constraint. Lagrange multipliers are used to compute the forces exerted by those constraints, where those 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. In order to generate visually different, and more realistic effects, some heuristics are introduced to modify the initial models of the objects. Those heuristics are advantageous since they are easy to implement and apply on different models.