Animating Elastic Rods with Sound

Eston Schweickart*, Doug L. James+, and Steve Marschner*
*Cornell University +Stanford University

Publication:

Animating Elastic Rods with Sound
Eston Schweickart, Doug L. James, and Steve Marschner.
ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2017). 36(4), Article 115. July 2017.
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Abstract:

Sound generation methods, such as linear modal synthesis, can sonify a wide range of physics-based animation of solid objects, resolving vibrations and sound radiation from various structures. However, elastic rods are an important computer animation primitive for which prior sound synthesis methods, such as modal synthesis, are ill-suited for several reasons: large displacements, nonlinear vibrations, dispersion effects, and the geometrically singular nature of rods.

In this paper, we present physically based methods for simultaneous generation of animation and sound for deformable rods. We draw on Kirchhoff theory to simplify the representation of rod dynamics and introduce a generalized dipole model to calculate the spatially varying acoustic radiation. In doing so, we drastically decrease the amount of precomputation required (in some cases eliminating it completely), while being able to resolve sound radiation for arbitrary body deformations encountered in computer animation. We present several examples, including challenging scenes involving thousands of highly coupled frictional contacts.

Video:

Supplementary Materials:

Raw Audio Results (WAV in ZIP, 2.9MB) | High Quality Video (MP4, 92MB) | Low Quality Video (MP4, 49MB)

Acknowledgements:

We would like to thank Dae Hyun Kim for early numerical experiments, Rafael Marinheiro for software contributions, and Risa Feng for useful discussion. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (Projects 0905506, 1011919, 1513967, and 1644523).
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