awesome-simulation

Awesome Physics-Based Simulation / Animation

A curated list of courses, researchers, literature, code, and other resources for physics-based simulation and animation. Continuously updated, contributions are welcome!

GitHub: github.com/Housz/awesome-simulation

1 Courses

Computer Graphics Fundamentals:

• [Lingqi Yan] GAMES101: Introduction to Modern Computer Graphics (in Chinese)
• [Ligang Liu] 2020 USTC “Computer Graphics” Undergraduate Course (in Chinese)
• [OpenGL] LearnOpenGL (Also available in Chinese) The best introductory tutorial for OpenGL.

Physics Simulation:

• [Huamin Wang] GAMES103: Introduction to Physics-Based Computer Animation (in Chinese) Covers math background, rigid bodies, mass-spring systems, constraints, collisions, soft bodies, FEM, and fluids. Very beginner-friendly. The four assignments (rigid body, cloth, soft body, fluid) use the Unity engine.
• [Yuanming Hu] GAMES201: Advanced Physics Engines 2020 (in Chinese) High depth and breadth; challenging without a numerical computation background. Covers Lagrangian, Eulerian, hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian views, and high-performance physics engines.
• [Tiantian Liu] Taichi Graphics Course (in Chinese) A CG course using the Taichi programming language. Covers Taichi data structures, ray tracing, elastomers (FEM, time integration), and fluids.
• [Xiaowei He] GAMES401: PeriDyno Physics Simulation Programming and Practice (Updating) (in Chinese) Based on the PeriDyno engine. Covers GPU programming (CUDA), rigid body dynamics, SPH, peridynamics, and Vulkan basics.
• [Minchen Li] Physics-based Animation of Solids and Fluids CMU physics simulation seminar. Covers optimization-based time integration, mass-spring systems, FEM, IPC, cloth, rigid bodies, reduced-order simulation, and fluids (Lagrangian, PIC/FLIP, MPM).
• [Teacher Xiaopeng] High-Performance Parallel Programming and Optimization Series (in Chinese) Covers CMake, modern C++, compiler optimization, TBB, memory access optimization, CUDA, and modern OpenGL.
• [Xi Wang] GAMES104: Modern Game Engines (in Chinese) Lectures 10/11 cover physics systems in game engines; Lectures 8/9 cover animation techniques.
• [Ladislav Kavan] CIS563 Physics based Animation (2014) Very detailed mathematical derivations. Covers mass-spring, PBD, Shape Matching, PDE basics, FEM, Projective Dynamics, rigid bodies, etc. CIS563 (2015) adds fluids. Supplementary content by Tiantian Liu (in Chinese). CS6660 (2017) adds Lagrangian/Hamiltonian mechanics perspectives.
• [Eitan Grinspun] Animation and CGI Motion Highly beginner-friendly, detailed derivations. Covers ODE numerical integration, Lagrangian mechanics, collisions/contact, continuum mechanics, FEM, shells/cloth, fluids, etc.
• [Matthias Müller] Ten Minute Physics Features JavaScript implementations for easy hands-on practice. Covers PBD/XPBD, soft bodies, spatial hashing, cloth, GPU programming basics, Eulerian/hybrid fluids, etc.
• [Adam Bargteil] SIGGRAPH’19 Course: An Introduction to Physics-Based Animation Introduces basic concepts of physics simulation with accompanying notes.

• [David I.W. Levin] CSC417/CSC2549 Physics-Based Animation

  YouTube

  Bilibili Covers Lagrangian mechanics, mass-spring systems, FEM, rigid bodies, and fluids.

• [Doug L. James] CS 5643: Physically Based Animation for Computer Graphics (2015) A comprehensive course that lists classic papers for each topic. Other courses: CS 448Z (2021), CS 248 (2022), CS 348C (2022).
• [Jernej Barbič] CSCI 520 Computer Animation and Simulation
• [Jan Bender] Physics Simulation in Visual Computing

Math & Numerical Foundations:

• Matrix Computation: GAMES103 Math Basics (in Chinese), 3Blue1Brown - Essence of Linear Algebra, Matrix Calculus Tutorial (in Chinese), Numerical Recipes, Wiki: Matrix calculus.
• Basic Numerical Analysis: Numerical Analysis 2020 Spring by Yanan Zhang, Soochow University (in Chinese).
• Advanced Numerical Analysis: Numerical Analysis USTC by Chi-Wang Shu, Brown University. An excellent numerical analysis course (in Chinese).
• Basic Optimization: Optimization Theory and Methods by Xueting Cui, SUFE (in Chinese). Reference texts include Stephen Boyd’s Convex Optimization and Jorge Nocedal’s Numerical Optimization.
• Advanced Optimization: Boyd’s Stanford Course (Bilibili Mirror) Taught by Stephen Boyd.
• Scientific Computing: EAS205 Applications of Scientific Computation (2014) by Ladislav Kavan. Covers vector/matrix math, linear systems, group theory, SVD, etc.
• Books: Numerical Recipes, Matrix Computations, Scientific Computing: An Introductory Survey, Iterative methods for sparse linear systems, A multigrid tutorial.

2 Researchers & Teams

Researchers:

• Yuanming Hu (MIT, Taichi Graphics)

  Zhihu (in Chinese)

  Frozen in 99 lines of code (in Chinese)

• Ligang Liu (USTC)

• Tiantian Liu (UPenn, Taichi Graphics)

  Zhihu (in Chinese)

• Huamin Wang (Ohio State University, Style3D)

  Zhihu (in Chinese)

• Chenfanfu Jiang (UCLA)

  Zhihu (in Chinese)

• Xinxin Zhang (UBC, ZENO)

  Zhihu (in Chinese)

• Minchen Li (CMU)

  Zhihu (in Chinese)

• Yun (Raymond) Fei (Adobe)

  Zhihu (in Chinese)

• Bo Ren (Nankai University)
• Jin Huang (Zhejiang University)
• Min Tang (Zhejiang University)
• Ming Gao (miHoYo)
• Bo Zhu (GaTech)
• Xiaowei He (CAS)
• Libin Liu (Peking University), Creator of GAMES105: Computer Character Animation (in Chinese)
• Xiaopei Liu (ShanghaiTech University)
• Yifei Li (MIT)
• David Baraff & Andrew Witkin (CMU, Pixar) — Pioneers of the field.
• Demetri Terzopoulos (UCLA)
• Eitan Grinspun (University of Toronto) Geometry, physics, etc.
• Ladislav Kavan (University of Utah, Facebook) Soft bodies, numerical methods.
• Robert Bridson (UBC, Autodesk) Fluids. Author of Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics.
• Joseph Teran (UC Davis)
• Markus Gross (ETH Zurich)
• Jos Stam (Nvidia) Inventor of Semi-Lagrangian advection in CG. Author of The Art of Fluid Animation.
• Jan Bender (RWTH Aachen University) SPH, soft bodies.
• Matthias Müller & Miles Macklin (NVIDIA) Creators of PBD/XPBD.
• Dinesh K. Pai (UBC)
• Paul G. Kry (McGill) & Sheldon Andrews (ÉTS) Rigid bodies, contact & friction.
• Jernej Barbic (USC)
• David I.W. Levin (University of Toronto)
• Doug L. James (Stanford)
• Theodore Kim (Yale)
• Matthias Teschner (University of Freiburg)
• Eftychios Sifakis (UW-Madison)
• Kenny Erleben (University of Copenhagen) Author of Physics-Based Animation.
• Jeff Trinkle (Lehigh University) Rigid bodies, robotics.
• Doyub Kim Author of Fluid Engine Development.
• Roy Featherstone (Italian Institute of Technology) Rigid bodies, robotics.
• C. Karen Liu (Stanford) Robotics, RL.
• Xue Bin (Jason) Peng (Simon Fraser University) Robotics, RL.
• Shinjiro Sueda (Texas A&M) Robotics, elastomers.
• Physics Simulation Genealogy Tree compiled by Yu Peng (in Chinese).

(To be continued…)

Research Teams

• Stanford Computer Graphics Laboratory
• Dynamic Graphics Project (University of Toronto)
• Computer Graphics UC Berkeley
• Computational Sciences Group (KAUST)
• Carnegie Mellon Graphics Lab
• Pixar Research

3 Resource Collections

• GAMES: Graphics And Mixed Environment Seminar Chinese CG communication platform (in Chinese).

• USTC “Frontiers of Computer Graphics” Summer School

  Bilibili Videos (in Chinese).

• Physics-Based Animation (physicsbasedanimation.com) Paper collection.
• Resource for Computer Graphics (Ke-Sen Huang) Paper collection.
• SIGGRAPH Courses & Resources
• Computer Graphics and Simulation Research Results
• Interactive Graphics (SPH, PBD, etc.) Code and papers.
• GraphiCon Zhihu Column (in Chinese).

(To be continued…)

4 Introductory Literature

• Siggraph ‘97 Course notes: Physically Based Modeling
• Physics-Based Animation (2005) Classic textbook.
• Foundations of Physically Based Modeling and Animation (2017) (Available in Chinese as 基于物理的建模与动画)
• Computer Animation: Algorithms and Techniques (2012) (Available in Chinese as 计算机动画算法与技术)
• Physics-Based Simulation by Minchen Li & Chenfanfu Jiang.
• Fluid Mechanics:
  • Fluid Engine Development by Doyub Kim. Code: Fluid Engine Dev. (Chinese translation available).
  • Fluid Simulation for Computer Graphics by Robert Bridson.
  • The Art of Fluid Animation by Jos Stam. (Chinese translation available).
• Cloth: Cloth Simulation for Computer Graphics
• Mass-Spring, FEM, PBD, Rigid Bodies: Real Time Physics Class Notes
• Game Dev Tutorial: Video Game Physics Tutorial
• SIGGRAPH 2018 Course: Parallel iterative solvers for real-time elastic deformations Marco Fratarcangeli, Huamin Wang, Yin Yang.
• SIGGRAPH 2020 Course: Dynamic Deformables: Implementation and Production Practicalities Theodore Kim, David Eberle.

Recommended Papers from GAMES103 (by Huamin Wang):

• Rigid Bodies: Witkin and Baraff. 2001. Physically Based Modeling – Rigid Body Dynamics. SIGGRAPH Courses.
• Shape Matching: Muller et al. 2005. Meshless Deformations Based on Shape Matching. TOG.
• Implicit Integration Pioneers: Baraff and Witkin. 1998. Large Step in Cloth Simulation. SIGGRAPH.
• Cloth: Bridson et al. 2003. Simulation of Clothing with Folds and Wrinkles. SCA.
• Cloth: Bergou et al. 2006. A Quadratic Bending Model for Inextensible Surfaces. SCA.
• PBD Improvement: Muller. 2008. Hierarchical Position Based Dynamics. VRIPHYS.
• Projective Dynamics: Bouaziz et al. 2014. Projective Dynamics: Fusing Constraint Projections for Fast Simulation. TOG.

• Constraints: Tournier et al. 2015. Stable Constrained Dynamics. TOG.

• UBC CPSC 533d Animation Physics Reading List
• Game Developer’s Book List (Notes mostly in Chinese)

(To be continued…)

5 Topics & Methods

Rigid Body

• Interactive Simulation of Rigid Body Dynamics in Computer Graphics
• Featherstone: Rigid Body Dynamics Algorithms
• SIGGRAPH’21 Course: Contact and Friction Simulation for Computer Graphics by Sheldon Andrews & Kenny Erleben.

Position Based Dynamics - A Survey on Position-Based Simulation Methods in Computer Graphics

MPM

• The Material Point Method for Simulating Continuum Materials

FEM

• FEM Simulation of 3D Deformable Solids: A practitioner’s guide to theory, discretization and model reduction

Energy Optimization Perspective (Fast Mass-Spring, Projective Dynamics, Quasi-Newton, ADMM)

• Tiantian Liu’s 2019 USTC Summer Course Lecture (in Chinese)

SPH

• Eurographics Tutorial 2019: Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Techniques for the Physics Based Simulation of Fluids and Solids Dan Koschier, Jan Bender, Barbara Solenthaler, Matthias Teschner.

USTC Summer School - Physics Simulation Lectures (all in Chinese)

• Official Site

  Bilibili Videos

• 2014 [Weiwei Xu] Fast Elastic Deformation Simulation Techniques
• 2016 [Jin Huang] Linearization and Dimensionality Reduction in Elastic Simulation
• 2017 [Paul Kry] Physics Based Computer Animation Fundamentals (English audio possible, hosted on Bilibili)
• 2018 [Juyong Zhang] Numerical Optimization in Geometric Optimization and Physics Simulation
• 2019 [Tiantian Liu] Towards Real-time Simulation of Deformable Objects
• 2021 [Bo Ren] Graphics Multi-fluid Simulation Using Lagrangian Particle Methods
• 2021 [Xiaopei Liu] High-Performance Visual Fluid Computing and Applications
• 2021 [Huamin Wang] Real-Time Cloth Simulation on GPUs
• 2021 [Ye Kuang, Jiancheng Liu] Taichi Programming Language and Differentiable Physics Simulation

(To be continued…)

6 Code & Tools

• Code Replicability in Computer Graphics: Collection of SIGGRAPH/TOG paper source codes.
• NumericalProjectsCollections: Open-source CG code curated by community members.

Open Source Engines & Libraries:

• Taichi: Taichi Graphics High-performance graphics programming language.
• ZENO: ZENO Node-based 3D engine by ZenoTech.
• libigl: libigl Lightweight geometry processing library for researchers.
• Box2D: Box2D Classic 2D physics engine.
• ODE: Open Dynamics Engine Classic rigid body library.
• Bullet/pyBullet: Bullet engine 3D physics engine (rigid/soft bodies) with C++/Python interfaces.
• DART: Dynamic Animation and Robotics Toolkit Robotics simulation & RL.

• PhysX / FleX: PhysX

  FleX Open-sourced NVIDIA game physics engines.

• ARCSim: ARCSim Adaptive Refining and Coarsening Simulator for cloth.
• OpenCloth: OpenCloth Cloth simulation.
• Pinocchio: Pinocchio Robotics simulation.
• MuJoCo: mujoco.org Robotics simulation (generalized coordinates), open-sourced by DeepMind.
• ReactPhysics3D: www.reactphysics3d.com Rigid bodies.
• Simbody: Simbody Multibody dynamics, biomechanics.
• Chrono: Project Chrono Multibody dynamics, FEM, vehicles.
• IPC: IPC Incremental Potential Contact.
• RigidBodyDynamics.jl: RigidBodyDynamics.jl Rigid body dynamics in Julia.
• RBDL: RBDL Rigid Body Dynamics Library (implements Featherstone’s algorithms).
• GEAR: GEAR Multibody dynamics library based on Lie groups/spatial algebra.
• PBD: PositionBasedDynamics
• SPH: SPlisHSPlasH
• Fluid Engine Dev: Fluid Engine Dev Fluid simulation library.
• PhysBAM: PhysBAM A comprehensive physics simulation library (rigid, deformable, fluids, cloth, FSI, etc.).
• mantaflow: mantaflow Extensible fluid simulation framework.
• Vega: VEGA FEM LIBRARY FEM simulation.
• NVIDIA Warp: NVIDIA Warp High-performance Python framework for GPU simulation by Miles Macklin.
• David.li: david.li WebGL physics simulation experiments.
• SimpleSimulationEngine: SimpleSimulationEngine Simulation/numerical library with C++/Python/Web interfaces.
• Multibody Survey: Survey of Multibody Dynamics Software
• Matrix Calculus: matrixcalculus.org Online matrix calculus tool.

Commercial Software:

• Houdini
• Blender (Open Source / Free)
• Maya
• Unity
• Unreal Engine

Solvers:

• Eigen: eigen.tuxfamily.org C++ template library for linear algebra (dense/sparse).
• Intel MKL: Intel oneAPI Math Kernel Library
• PARDISO: PARDISO Large-scale sparse linear system solver (C/C++, Julia, Fortran, Matlab).
• SuiteSparse: SuiteSparse Large-scale sparse linear system solver.

(To be continued…)

7 Conferences & Journals

Conferences

| Abbreviation | Full Name | | :— | :— | | SIGGRAPH / SIGGRAPH ASIA | ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics | | Eurographics | Annual Conference of the European Association for Computer Graphics | | PG | Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications | | SCA | ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation | | I3D | ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games | | MIG | The ACM SIGGRAPH Conference on Motion, Interaction and Games | | IEEE VR | IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces |

Journals

Abbreviation	Full Name	IF	JCR Quartile
TOG	ACM Transactions on Graphics	9.5	Q1
TVCG	IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics	5.2	Q1
CGF	Computer Graphics Forum	2.7	Q2
C&G	Computers & Graphics	2.5	Q2
TVC	The Visual Computer	3.0	Q2
CAVW	Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds	1.5	Q3
GM	Graphical Models	1.5	Q3
IEEE CG&A	IEEE Computer Applications and Graphics	2.0	Q3
CVMJ	Computational Visual Media	12.9	Q1
PACMCGIT	Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques	2.3	Q3

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