Physically plausible animation of object fracture has recently gained prominence for visual effects and interactive applications, due to the sophistication of computational techniques and the growing maturity of graphics hardware that make these previously intractable problems computationally feasible.

This research paper presents a fast, adaptive fracture animation system that simulates varied and realistic fracture patterns for brittle objects. This is achieved by formulating fracture as an optimization problem where the distribution of fracture fragments is guided by the deformation energy of the fracture object. One of the main observations is that this can be cast as the computation of a high-dimensional centroidal Voronoi diagram (CVD). Additionally, an orders-of-magnitude speedup can be achieved by precomputing the fracture degree from examples, and using a highly parallel tessellation scheme. The main benefit of this approach is the combination of Voronoi methods with physical simulation for fast and physically plausible fracture animation.

The paper is well presented and the results shown in the paper and accompanying video suitably demonstrate the performance of the authors’ method. The target audience for this paper is rather narrow, however, and is limited to those with a prior understanding of computational geometry. This work also follows recent advances in the area, most notably the work of Müller et al. [1] and the release of the NVIDIA APEX Destruction library. The comparative benefits of this approach remain unclear, diminishing the impact of this paper.