Based on the photos, you can see how FEM offers a more detailed modeling for complex structures in comparison to the spring-mass method. This results in FEM requiring more computational resources which increases its complexity. Contrastingly, the spring-mass method provides a simpler, intuitive approach for linear systems which is why it can be used for conceptual designs. Because these images are pretty similar, for what structures would FEM be significantly more advantageous? Also what trade-offs exist between the computational efficiency when choosing between these methods?
michaelwiradharma
Watching these renders remind me of the game Totally Accurate Battle Simulator which gained popularity for a short while a few years ago. This makes we wonder how much of the animation choices for its characters were more of a design choice rather than computational limitation.
agao25
@jsun28 I think FEM would be significantly more advantageous for mesh structures that aren't really coplanar. I feel like the mass-spring model can get away with oversimplification of FEM meshes if the mesh is really planar because the physical analysis isn't really changing. But if the mesh element spans multiple dimensions and the physical response is different for each vertex, then the FEM solution might be much more accurate. Seems like there's been a lot of research into this topic as well, I listed two research papers/discussions on improving efficiency and it seems like in one specific application, optimizing an FEM model to be linear drastically reduced computational time almost very close to the mass-spring model, but gave much more accurate and useful results.
This feels to resemble the physics of the dress more. However, I feel like it might be a lot more costly since there's a lot of computations on all the different areas of the dress.
Based on the photos, you can see how FEM offers a more detailed modeling for complex structures in comparison to the spring-mass method. This results in FEM requiring more computational resources which increases its complexity. Contrastingly, the spring-mass method provides a simpler, intuitive approach for linear systems which is why it can be used for conceptual designs. Because these images are pretty similar, for what structures would FEM be significantly more advantageous? Also what trade-offs exist between the computational efficiency when choosing between these methods?
Watching these renders remind me of the game Totally Accurate Battle Simulator which gained popularity for a short while a few years ago. This makes we wonder how much of the animation choices for its characters were more of a design choice rather than computational limitation.
@jsun28 I think FEM would be significantly more advantageous for mesh structures that aren't really coplanar. I feel like the mass-spring model can get away with oversimplification of FEM meshes if the mesh is really planar because the physical analysis isn't really changing. But if the mesh element spans multiple dimensions and the physical response is different for each vertex, then the FEM solution might be much more accurate. Seems like there's been a lot of research into this topic as well, I listed two research papers/discussions on improving efficiency and it seems like in one specific application, optimizing an FEM model to be linear drastically reduced computational time almost very close to the mass-spring model, but gave much more accurate and useful results.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15455873/ https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/75975.pdf
This feels to resemble the physics of the dress more. However, I feel like it might be a lot more costly since there's a lot of computations on all the different areas of the dress.