Blobby cubes, spheres, and cows.

After downloading camstudio I thought I'd capture some videos of the work I've been doing lately.

My research involves the idea that the combination of physics and generative systems can produce complex and "organic" structures. My primary focus is on "real world" physics and generative systems that are based on biological developmental systems. A first step in this direction was to implement some physical simulation environments.

The current environment I am working on considers objects as being decomposed into discrete tetrahedral elements. The physics is locally volume-conserving, and uses the ideas in "A Versatile and Robust Model for Geometrically Complex Deformable Solids" (Teschner et al. 2004). The rationale for selecting this model is that it is conceptually simple and is fairly fast. The following videos demonstrate some experiments I've done with my implementation of the ideas.

This video shows some spheres dropping onto the ground and deforming. The video shows a set of different spheres, each with different stiffness/springiness parameters. The program runs in real-time, however the video is sped-up by 4 times.



This video shows a variety of cubes with different stiffnesses (sped-up by 4 times).



And finally, here is a tetrahedralised cow falling over. The view with the spheres shows the discretisation of mass of the model.