Fracture modeling in computer graphics

This master thesis focuses on the study of the state of the art on crack and fracture modeling. This process is one of the aging phenomena with an important amount of work done, due to its complexity and its extended application area. The variety of parameters and the complex simulation (usually implying collision detection, deformations, breakage, etc), make difficult to think on a generic solution. Thus, we cannot consider it as a simple problem to solve, but as many difficult problems to deal with. The study is divided as follows. First, we expose the theoretical background concerning aging phenomena, and their behavior in nature. Due to the amount of work already proposed in Computer Graphics, we review and classify the existing techniques according to their kind of approach. The second part is focused on physically-based methods, presenting the work that has been done along with their advantages and disadvantages. Another chapter is dedicated to the less popular, but equally important, non-physically based methods. Finally, we conclude making a brief analysis about the main characteristics of these method, and some open problems.