Volume Preserving Simulation of Soft Tissue with Skin

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel volume-preserving simulation method for soft tissues that directly enforces volume constraints, improving stability and realism over traditional models, especially for incompressible biological tissues.

Contribution

The authors propose a direct volume preservation approach with zonal constraints and a skin model, overcoming limitations of Poisson's ratio-based methods in soft tissue simulation.

Findings

Produces stable, realistic deformations with precise volume preservation.

Avoids locking artifacts common in coarse discretizations.

Enables resolution-independent simulation of incompressible materials.

Abstract

Simulation of human soft tissues in contact with their environment is essential in many fields, including visual effects and apparel design. Biological tissues are nearly incompressible. However, standard methods employ compressible elasticity models and achieve incompressibility indirectly by setting Poisson's ratio to be close to 0.5. This approach can produce results that are plausible qualitatively but inaccurate quantatively. This approach also causes numerical instabilities and locking in coarse discretizations or otherwise poses a prohibitive restriction on the size of the time step. We propose a novel approach to alleviate these issues by replacing indirect volume preservation using Poisson's ratios with direct enforcement of zonal volume constraints, while controlling fine-scale volumetric deformation through a cell-wise compression penalty. To increase realism, we propose an epidermis model to mimic the dramatically higher surface stiffness on real skinned bodies. We demonstrate that our method produces stable realistic deformations with precise volume preservation but without locking artifacts. Due to the volume preservation not being tied to mesh discretization, our method also allows a resolution consistent simulation of incompressible materials. Our method improves the stability of the standard neo-Hookean model and the general compression recovery in the Stable neo-Hookean model.