Nvidia Corporation

Stefan Jeschke

Nuttapong Chentanez

Miles Macklin

Matthias Mueller-Fischer

Viktor Makoviichuk

Matthias Mueller Fischer

A cable driving a large system such as cable driven machines, cable cars or tendons in a human or robot is typically modeled as a large number of small segments that are connected via joints. The two main difficulties with this model are satisfying the inextensibility constraint and handling the typically large mass ratio between the segments and the objects they connect. This disclosure introduces an effective approach to solving these problems. The introduced approach simulates the effect of a cable using a new type of distance constraint called 'cable joint' that changes both its attachment points and its rest length dynamically. The introduced approach models a cable connecting a series of objects, e.g., components of a robot, as a sequence of cable joints, reducing the complexity of the simulation from the order of the number of segments in the cable to the number of connected objects.

Simulating a cable driven system representative of a robot

This disclosure presents a process to generate one or more video frames through guiding the movements of a target object in an environment controlled by physics-based constraints. The target object is guided by the movements of a reference object from a motion capture (MOCAP) video clip. As disturbances, environmental factors, or other physics-based constraints interfere with the target object mimicking the reference object. A tracking agent, along with a corresponding neural network, can be used to compensate and modify the movements of the target object. Should the target object diverge significantly from the reference object, such as falling down, a recovery agent, along with a corresponding neural network, can be used to move the target object back into an approximate alignment with the reference object before resuming the tracking process.

Imitating motion capture clips using a neural network

A cable driving a large system such as cable driven machines, cable cars or tendons in a human or robot is typically modeled as a large number of small segments that are connected via joints. The two main difficulties with this approach are satisfying the inextensibility constraint and handling the typically large mass ratio between the small segments and the larger objects they connect. This disclosure introduces a more effective approach to solving these problems. The introduced approach simulates the effect of a cable instead of the cable itself using a new type of distance constraint called 'cable joint' that changes both its attachment points and its rest length dynamically. The introduced approach models a cable connecting a series of objects as a sequence of cable joints, reducing the complexity of the simulation from the order of the number of segments in the cable to the number of connected objects.

Simulating a cable driven system by simulating the effect of cable portions on objects of the system

Embodiments of the present invention provide a novel method and discretization for animating water waves. The approaches disclosed combine the flexibility of a numerical approach to wave simulation with the stability and visual detail provided by a spectrum-based approach to provide Eulerian methods for simulating large-scale oceans with highly detailed wave features. A graphics processing unit stores a one-dimensional texture referred to as a wave profile buffer that stores pre-computed results at a number of discrete sample points for performing wave height evaluation. The water surface is rendered according to water height values computed using the wave profile, accounting for advection, spatial diffusion, angular diffusion, boundary reflections, and dissipation.

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Santa Clara, CA, United States of America

Stefan Jeschke