Divide and Truncate: A Penetration and Inversion Free Framework for Coupled Multi-physics Systems

TL;DR

Divide and Truncate (DAT) is a unified, penetration-free framework for simulating coupled multi-physics systems, ensuring robust contact handling across various object types without damping or deadlock issues.

Contribution

The paper introduces DAT, a novel space partitioning and truncation method that guarantees penetration-free contact resolution for diverse multi-physics simulations, independent of material properties.

Findings

DAT guarantees penetration-free contact handling in complex multi-physics systems.

Planar-DAT improves realism by allowing unconstrained tangential motion.

The framework is compatible with any iterative solver, enhancing robustness.

Abstract

We present Divide and Truncate (DAT), a unified framework for coupling multi-physics systems through penetration-free collision handling, including rigid bodies, volumetric soft bodies, thin shells, rods, and animated objects. By partitioning the ambient space into exclusive regions and truncating displacements to remain within them, DAT guarantees penetration-free contact resolution. Our \emph{Planar-DAT} variant further refines this by restricting only motion toward nearby surfaces, leaving tangential movement unconstrained, which addresses the artificial damping and deadlock problems of previous works. The framework is material-agnostic: each object responds to contact without knowledge of the opposing body's physics. Our method is also solver-agnostic; it can be integrated seamlessly with any iterative optimizer as a post-processing step, enabling robust simulation of complex multi-body interactions.