Felix Fährmann

Masterarbeit Felix Fährmann

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, März 2012

Due to the development in computer hardware the visualisation of physics in virtual
realities improved tremendously in recent years. However, less effort was put into the
visualisation of three-dimensional dynamic surface deformations. Deformations on
objects or terrain are predominantly displayed in pixel based methods like normal
mapping, that have considerable clear drawbacks compared to vertex based methods.
In this thesis dynamic surface deformations are visualised with the help of vertex
based methods. For this two different approaches are used. The first approach uses
a displacement map to achieve surface deformations. The local detail of geometry in
the area of deformation is for that matter strongly tessellated, to reproduce the detail
of the displacement map onto the geometry of the object in an optimised manner.
Thanks to this implementation it is possible to calculate and display physically
plausible meteor impact craters depending on the impact directions and angles of
the incoming meteors. It is also possible to visualise realistic impressions a cube casts
into a deformable surface, depending on its orientation. For the second approach a
physically and mathematically sound simulation based on the finite element method
is tested. The possibility of parallel processing on the GPU is examined but discarded
for CPU processing based on the obtained results.