Efficient Incremental Potential Contact for Actuated Face Simulation

Abstract: We present a quasi-static finite element simulator for human face animation. We model the face as an actuated soft body, which can be efficiently simulated using Projective Dynamics (PD). We adopt Incremental Potential Contact (IPC) to handle self-intersection. However, directly integrating IPC into the simulation would impede the high efficiency of the PD solver, since the stiffness matrix in the global step is no longer constant and cannot be pre-factorized. We notice that the actual number of vertices affected by the collision is only a small fraction of the whole model, and by utilizing this fact we effectively decrease the scale of the linear system to be solved. With the proposed optimization method for collision, we achieve high visual fidelity at a relatively low performance overhead.