Affinification: A Fine Approximation of Deformations

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× faster compared to elastic simulations, while retaining similar levels of visual fidelity.