A GPU-accelerated finite element solver for simulation of soft-body deformation

A nonlinear physical simulation is presented involving the soft body deformation and interaction contacts. We demonstrate the finite element method relying on Lagrangian discretization to simulate the deformation of the soft body with hyperelastic material properties. To perform a stable simulation, we use the constrained Delaunay Tetrahedralization to resampling and remeshing the object. A new contact strategy is developed and used to replace the collision detection. This method does not need to iteratively achieve the optimal contact response on the constrained boundary. It can dynamically determine whether the contact status of the point should be in a static or a sliding friction mode. The explicit method for the finite element model is employed in order to perform all the steps of the algorithm on the GPUs and achieve a real-time simulation.