Albert Jian Sheng Tan Mulligan
Generating Crack Patterns with Hybrid Physical/Heuristic Approach
Summary
This project presents an alteration to an already existing method presented for generating crack patterns on surface meshes. This original method creates identifiably realistic crack patterns, while also affording high levels of heuristically based control for artists to use. My deviation from this algorithm takes away some physically based realism of the method, however it reduces the run time of the algorithm by taking a few shortcuts. It also adds extra parameters to give artists more control. While the original method creates cracks of varying scenarios, we focus on cracks developed through impacts in this paper. Some other crack patterns are presented but not in detail. The method takes a triangular mesh and develops a stress field through an intuitive and artistic approach. From this stress field, we take a physically based method loosely based on Finite Element Modeling to decide the placement, direction, length and shape of cracks. We then can define several parameters that will give artistic control to an artist to control the way the crack is developed. The method does not produce the most realistic cracks, being heavily based on heuristics after all, however it produces very quickly identifiable and plausible crack patterns. Future works and analysis are then presented.
Thesis Generating Crack Patterns with Hybrid Physical/Heuristic Approach