Volume Preserving Simulation of Soft Tissue with Skin

Abstract: Simulation of human soft tissues in contact with their environment is essential in many fields, including visual effects and apparel design. Biological tissues are nearly incompressible. However, standard methods employ compressible elasticity models and achieve incompressibility indirectly by setting Poisson's ratio to be close to 0.5. This approach can produce results that are plausible qualitatively but inaccurate quantatively. This approach also causes numerical instabilities and locking in coarse discretizations or otherwise poses a prohibitive restriction on the size of the time step. We propose a novel approach to alleviate these issues by replacing indirect volume preservation using Poisson's ratios with direct enforcement of zonal volume constraints, while controlling fine-scale volumetric deformation through a cell-wise compression penalty. To increase realism, we propose an epidermis model to mimic the dramatically higher surface stiffness on real skinned bodies. We demonstrate that our method produces stable realistic deformations with precise volume preservation but without locking artifacts. Due to the volume preservation not being tied to mesh discretization, our method also allows a resolution consistent simulation of incompressible materials. Our method improves the stability of the standard neo-Hookean model and the general compression recovery in the Stable neo-Hookean model.