Adaptive Sub-stepping for Constrained Rigid Body Simulations

Abstract

Achieving stable simulation of constrained rigid body systems is a primary concern for many computer graphic applications, such as video games, robotic planning, and virtual reality training. In this paper, we present a novel adaptive sub-stepping scheme that achieves stable simulation by adaptively reducing the time step as needed. Our approach employs a diagonalized geometric stiffness matrix as a heuristic to determine when smaller time steps are required, and adjusts the number of sub-steps accordingly. Our method is straightforward to integrate into existing rigid body simulators, and further eliminates manually tuning the number of sub-steps required. We demonstrate the ability of our method to produce stable simulates at real-time frame rates using a number of challenging, complex examples.

    @inproceedings{adaptSubstep2024,
        author = {Giles, Chris and Andrews, Sheldon},
        title = {Adaptive Sub-stepping for Constrained Rigid Body Simulations},
        year = {2024},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction, and Games},
        articleno = {6},
        numpages = {10},
        location = {Arlington, VA, USA},
        series = {MIG ‘24}
        doi = {10.1145⁄3677388.3696331}
    }