Augmented material point method for simulating phase changes and varied materials

Abstract

The disclosure provides an approach for simulating and rendering materials across different states and undergoing phase transitions. In one configuration, a simulation application generates video frames depicting a material phenomenon using an augmented material point method (MPM). Traditional MPM does not handle incompressible materials such as fluids. Techniques disclosed herein augment the MPM with a Chorin-style projection technique to enable simulation of arbitrarily incompressible materials. In one configuration, this is achieved with a marker-and-cell (MAC) grid based MPM solver, a splitting of stress used in the simulation into elastic and dilational parts, a projection-like implicit treatment of the Eulerian evolution of the dilational part of the stress, and particular techniques for rasterizing and updating quantities on the MAC grid. In addition, a heat model may be coupled to the MPM solver, allowing material changes to be driven with temperature and phase changes.