Physically based animation of sea anemones in real-time
José Juan Aliaga Maraver, Caroline Larboulette · 2009
This paper presents a technique for modeling and animating fiber-like objects such as sea anemones tentacles in real-time. Each fiber is described by a generalized cylinder defined around an articulated skeleton. The dynamics of each individual fiber is controlled by a physically based simulation that updates the position of the skeleton's frames over time. We take into account the forces generated by the surrounding fluid as well as a stiffness function describing the bending behavior of the fiber. High level control of the animation is achieved through the use of four types of singularities to describe the three-dimensional continuous velocity field representing the fluid. We thus animate hundreds of fibers by key-framing only a small number of singularities. We apply this algorithm on a seascape composed of many sea anemones. We also show that our algorithm is more general and can be applied to other types of objects composed of fibers such as seagrasses.