MCA-Based Animation of Fracturing Heterogeneous Objects

Existing techniques for animation of object fracture have a basic assumption that the object materials are homogeneous while most materials in real world are heterogeneous. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel method called MCA to simulate the fracture of heterogeneous materials. The method of movable cellular automata (MCA) is based on the discrete concept and provides advantages both of classical cellular automaton and discrete element methods. First, the object is represented as discrete sphere particles, named movable cellular automata, and then the MCA method is used to simulate the material and physical properties as well as to determine when and where the fracture occurs. To meet the real-time requirement, the MCA simulation is performed on GPU with CUDA in order to accelerate the complex calculation of automata´s physical properties. After simulation, the results are directly sent to the vertex buffer object (VBO) for rendering to avoid the costly communication between CPU and GPU. The experimental results show the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.