Affinification: A Fine Approximation of Deformations

Was rigidification too strict? Let’s find out in Affinification

Abstract: We introduce affinification, a novel method for accelerating physics-based animation of elastic solids. During a time-dependent simulation, our method automatically partitions the space into affine and elastic regions depending on the deformation. As such, we capture localized deformations while significantly reducing computational costs with larger regions of model reduction. We design a new clustering method based on deformation rates to capture affinely deforming regions, and explore multiple heuristics for seeding, pattern generation, and the impact of physical parameters on coarsened regions. We compare our method with the ground truth, showing performance increasing with resolution and recorded simulations up to 17 times faster compared to elastic simulations, while retaining similar levels of visual fidelity.

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Authors

Alexandre Mercier-Aubin, Teseo Schneider, Paul G. Kry, and Sheldon Andrews

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Bibtex

@article{Affinification,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{Affinification: A Fine Approximation of Deformations}},
author = {Mercier-Aubin, Alexandre and Schneider, Teseo and Kry, Paul and Andrews, Sheldon},
year = {2026},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.},
ISSN = {1467-8659},
DOI = {10.1111/cgf.70382}
}