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EMU: Efficient Muscle Simulation in Deformation Space
Vismay Modi, Lawson Fulton, Alec Jacobson, Shinjiro Sueda, David I.W. Levin
Scalable FEM-quality muscle simulator handling heterogeneous materials including soft muscles, tendons, and bones without geometric coarsening.
Abstract
EMU is an efficient and scalable model to simulate bulk musculoskeletal motion with heterogenous materials. First, EMU requires no model reductions, or geometric coarsening, thereby producing results visually accurate when compared to an FEM simulation. Second, EMU is efficient and scales much better than state‐of‐the‐art FEM with the number of elements in the mesh, and is more easily parallelizable. Third, EMU can handle heterogeneously stiff meshes with an arbitrary constitutive model, thus allowing it to simulate soft muscles, stiff tendons and even stiffer bones all within one unified system. These three key characteristics of EMU enable us to efficiently orchestrate muscle activated skeletal movements. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach via a number of examples with tendons, muscles, bones and joints.
How to read this
- Category
- Method: efficient heterogeneous muscle simulation (EMU)
- Contributions
- EMU, a deformation-space muscle simulator that produces FEM-accurate results with no model reduction or geometric coarsening
- Better scaling than state-of-the-art FEM with element count, and more easily parallelizable
- Handles heterogeneously stiff meshes with an arbitrary constitutive model, unifying soft muscle, stiff tendon, and bone in one system
- Context
- Builds on quasistatic FEM flesh and muscle simulation (e.g. Teran et al.), reformulating the problem in deformation space for efficiency and heterogeneous-material handling.Builds on: Robust Quasistatic Finite Elements and Flesh Simulation
- Correctness
- Claims visual accuracy comparable to FEM with better scaling, shown on tendon/muscle/bone/joint examples; as the validation is example-based and visual, a reader should not assume it is a clinically accurate biomechanical model.
- Clarity
- Technical; a first pass conveys the efficiency and heterogeneity claims, while the deformation-space formulation needs a second pass.
- How to read it
- First pass for why deformation space buys scalability and heterogeneous stiffness in one solver; second pass on the formulation and constitutive handling if you implement musculoskeletal simulation.
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Related work
- Simulation of Hand Anatomy Using Medical Imaging 2022 / SIGGRAPH Asia
- How to Build a Human: Practical Physics-Based Character Animation 2016 / DigiPro
- Shape Targeting: A Versatile Active Elasticity Constitutive Model 2020 / SIGGRAPH
- Fast Simulation of Deformable Characters with Articulated Skeletons in Projective Dynamics 2019 / SCA
Keywords
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