A short YouTube video (Two Minute Papers) explaining recent UC Berkeley research on more physically accurate simulations of tearing and cracking in materials. The speaker summarizes that the new algorithm concentrates computation near likely crack regions, enabling realistic tearing for materials like rubber, cork, metal, vinyl and glass, and adds artist-directed controls to guide where tears occur.
Greetings to all of you fellow scholars out there. This is two Minute Papers where I explain awesome research works a couple minutes at a time. You know, I wish someone explained to me in simple terms what's going on in genetics, biology, and just about every field of scientific research. There are tons of wonderful works coming every day that we don't know about, and I'm trying my best here to bring it to you the simplest way I possibly can. So, you know researchers are people, and physics research at the Hadron Collider basically means that people smash atoms together. Well, computer graphics people also like to have some fun and write simulation programs to smash together a variety of objects in slow motion. However, even though most of these simulations look pretty good, they are physically not correct as many effects are neglected, such as simulating plasticity, bending stiffness, stretching energies, and many others. But unfortunately these are too expensive to compute in high resolution unless you have some tricks up the sleeve. Researchers at UC Berkeley have managed to crack this nut by creating an algorithm that uses more computational resources only around regions where cracks are likely to happen. This new technique enables the simulation of tearing for a variety of materials like cork, foils, metals, vinyl, and it also yields physically correct results for glass. Here's an example of a beaten up rubber sheet from their simulation program. Compared to a real world photograph, it's really awesome that you can do something on your computer in a virtual world that has something to do with reality. It is impossible to get used to this feeling. It's so amazing. And what's even better, since it is really difficult to know in advance how the cracks would exactly look like, they have also enhanced the directability of the simulation so artists could change things up a bit to achieve a desired artistic effect. In this example, they have managed to avoid tearing a duck in two by weakening the paths around them. Bravo. Thanks for watching and if you liked this series, just hit the like and subscribe buttons below the video to become a member of our growing club of scholars. Thanks and I'll see you next time.
