Real-time deformation using modal analysis on graphics hardware

This paper presents an approach for fast simulating deformable objects that is suitable for interactive applications in computer graphics. Linear modal analysis is often used to simulate small-amplitude deformation. Compared to traditional linear modal analysis where the CPU has been used to calculate the nodal displacements, the vertex program of GPU has been found widely adopted in the current applications. However the calculation suffers from great errors due to the limitation of the number of the input registers on GPU vertex pipeline. In our approach, we solve this problem by the fragment program. A series of 2D floating point textures are used to hold the model displacement matrix, the fragment program multiplies this matrix with the modal amplitude and sums up the results. Experiments show that the proposed technique fully utilizes the parallelism nature of GPU, and runs in real-time even for the complex models.