Volumetric Soft Body Simulation

Elastic deformation is an essential component of animation pipelines. Volumetric soft body simulation can be used to capture the complex details of muscle and skin, e.g. volume preservation under collision/compression. In visual effects, such methods must also be robust to extreme deformation (no numerical blow-ups) and fast enough for interactive manipulation. Moreover, many of the underlying material models are nonlinear and computationally expensive, such as hyper-elastic models for realistic tissue or artistically-defined deformation. Toward these challenges I propose the implementation of a volumetric soft body solver in Blender, that is not only rapid and robust, but is general to hyper-elastic materials. The solver will also be capable of robustly resolving self-collisions and possibly other constraints. This would greatly improve the use of physics in Blender for animation pipelines.