Interactive Material and Damping Design

Finite Element Method (FEM) has been widely used for simulations of three-dimensional deformable objects. To produce compelling and artist-controllable FEM dynamics, it is critically important to set the correct material elasticity and damping properties. This thesis presents an intuitive and interactive design method to explore the high-dimensional space of material and damping properties for use in FEM simulations in computer graphics, animation and related fields. This thesis first demonstrates how to intuitively explore the space of isotropic and anisotropic nonlinear materials, for design of FEM animations. Previous applications of nonlinear solid elasticity employed materials from a few standard families such as linear corotational, nonlinear St. Venant-Kirchhoff and Neo-Hookean material. However, the spaces of all nonlinear isotropic and anisotropic materials are infinite-dimensional and much broader than …