ABSTRACT
Real-time simulation and animation of 3D global de formations is the bottleneck of many applications, such as a surgical simulator. In this paper, we present a system that simulates physically realistic large deforma tions of soft objects in real-time. We achieve the phys ical realism by modeling the global deformation using geometncally nonlinear finite element methods. We ob tain real-time dynamic simulation of models of reason able complexity by preprocessing the LU-factorization of a small number of large matrices. To reduce the time and space required for such a preprocess, and the time of the back-substitution, we apply modified nested dissection to reorder the finite element mesh. We also introduce an efficient method that handles deformable object collisions with almost no extra cost.
