UCLA

Simulating fluids and solid materials undergoing large deformation remains an important and challenging problem in Computer Graphics. The dynamics of these materials usually involve dramatic topological changes and therefore require sophisticated numerical approaches to achieve sufficient accuracy and visual realism. This dissertation focuses on the Material Point Method (MPM) for simulating solids and fluids for use in computer animation, and it makes four major contributions: First, we introduce new MPM for simulating viscoelastic fluids, foams and sponges. Our second contribution is to introduce a novel technique designed to retain the stability of the original PIC, without suffering from the noise and instability of FLIP. Our third contribution is to introduce a novel material point method for heat transport, melting and solidifying materials. Our fourth contribution is to show that recasting the backward Euler method as a minimization problem allows Newton's method to be stabilized by standard optimization techniques

with some novel improvements of our own.