Peter Popov wrote:
> 
> This is an interesting FEM-based solution:
> 
> O'Brien, J. F., Hodgins, J. K. Graphical Modeling and Animation of
> Brittle Fracture. SIGGRAPH 99 Conference Proceedings, 137-146, 1999
> 
> Further work of O'Brien et. al. can be found in more recent
> proceedings of the SIGGRAPH conferences.

Thanks, i already knew about these, very interesting but some of the
methods used are hardly physically accurate, the FEM is used to determine
the stress field to conclude where fractures occur, but initiation and
propagation of cracks in brittle material is strongly influenced by
microscopic defects in the material and the crystallographic structure
(just imagine a pane of amorphous glass will break totally different than
one made of crystalline material).  Anyway despite the lot of guessing
probably involved the results look fairly good.  Sadly the calculations
seem quite complicated (refining the FEM grid during calculations etc.)
and calculation speed is accordingly slow.

For those interested in the material:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~job/Papers/

> Actually brittle fracture is not the worst problem - try getting the
> hang of plastically tipped crack propagation :)

I know, everything has it's pros and cons, while ductile fracture is much
more deterministic the effects to take into consideration are much more
diverse...

Christoph

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