Unified Many Worlds Browsing
of Arbitrary Physics-Based Animations
ACM SIGGRAPH 2022
Abstract
Manually tuning physics-based animation parameters to explore a simulation outcome space or achieve desired motion outcomes can be notoriously tedious. Unfortunately, this problem has motivated many sophisticated and specialized optimization-based methods for fine-grained (keyframe) control, each of which are typically limited to specific animation phenomena, usually complicated, and, unfortunately, not widely used. In this paper, we propose Unified Many-Worlds Browsing (UMWB), a practical method for sample-level control and exploration of arbitrary physics-based animations. Our approach supports browsing of large simulation ensembles of arbitrary animation phenomena by using a unified volumetric WorldPack representation based on spatiotemporally compressed voxel data associated with geometric occupancy and other low-fidelity animation state. Beyond memory reduction, the WorldPack representation also enables unified query support for interactive browsing: it provides fast evaluation of approximate spatiotemporal queries, such as occupancy tests that find ensemble samples (“worlds”) where material is either IN or NOT IN a user-specified spacetime region. The WorldPack representation also supports real-time hardware-accelerated voxel rendering by exploiting the spatially hierarchical and temporal RLE raster data structure to accelerate GPU ray tracing of compressed animations. Our UMWB implementation supports interactive browsing (and offline refinement) of ensembles containing thousands of simulation samples, and fast spatiotemporal queries and ranking. We show UMWB results using a wide variety of different physics-based animation phenomena---not just Jell-O.
Video
Supplemental
Citation
Acknowledgements
Copyright Notice
The documents contained in these directories are included by the contributing authors as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work on a non-commercial basis. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders, notwithstanding that they have offered their works here electronically. It is understood that all persons copying this information will adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.