Divide and Truncate: A Penetration and Inversion Free Framework for Coupled Multi-physics Systems
This work addresses the long-standing problem of robust, penetration-free contact handling in multi-physics simulation, offering a general solution applicable to diverse material types and solvers.
The paper introduces Divide and Truncate (DAT), a framework for penetration-free contact handling in coupled multi-physics systems. It guarantees collision resolution without artificial damping or deadlock, and is material- and solver-agnostic, enabling robust simulation of complex interactions.
We present Divide and Truncate (DAT), a unified framework for coupling multi-physics systems through penetration-free collision handling, including rigid bodies, volumetric soft bodies, thin shells, rods, and animated objects. By partitioning the ambient space into exclusive regions and truncating displacements to remain within them, DAT guarantees penetration-free contact resolution. Our \emph{Planar-DAT} variant further refines this by restricting only motion toward nearby surfaces, leaving tangential movement unconstrained, which addresses the artificial damping and deadlock problems of previous works. The framework is material-agnostic: each object responds to contact without knowledge of the opposing body's physics. Our method is also solver-agnostic; it can be integrated seamlessly with any iterative optimizer as a post-processing step, enabling robust simulation of complex multi-body interactions.