Robust Treatment of Degenerate Elements in Interactive Corotational FEM Simulations

How to read this

Category

Method: robust degenerate-element handling in corotational FEM

Contributions

• A robust scheme for treating element collapse and inversion in corotational FEM simulations of deformable objects in 2D and 3D
• Faster and smoother recovery from degenerate configurations than prior approaches, avoiding their flaws
• A widened range of well-behaved degenerate elements, improving stability of interactive soft-body simulation

Context

Sits in the deformable-object FEM lineage (Terzopoulos et al.'s 'Elastically Deformable Models') and the corotational-elasticity tradition, targeting the long-known problem of inverted and collapsed elements.Builds on: Elastically Deformable Models

Correctness

Demonstrated for interactive corotational FEM in 2D and 3D with improved degeneration recovery; it addresses element degeneracy specifically rather than a full constitutive overhaul, so a reader should view it as a robustness fix within the corotational framework, not a replacement for it.

Clarity

Technical but focused; a first pass conveys the degeneracy problem and the claimed improvement, with a second pass needed for the recovery scheme details.

How to read it

Read if you hit instability from inverted/collapsed elements; focus on how the method detects and recovers from degeneracy versus prior schemes, and do a second pass on the formulation before integrating it into a corotational solver.