Simulation of Deformable Objects using GLSL 4.3

Abstract

In this research, we implement a deformable object simulation system using OpenGL's shader language, GLSL4.3. Deformable object simulation is implemented by using volumetric mass-spring system suitable for real-time simulation among the methods of deformable object simulation. The compute shader in GLSL 4.3 which helps to access the GPU resources, is used to parallelize the operations of existing deformable object simulation systems. The proposed system is implemented using a compute shader for parallel processing and it includes a bounding box-based collision detection solution. In general, the collision detection is one of severe computing bottlenecks in simulation of multiple deformable objects. In order to validate an efficiency of the system, we performed the experiments using the 3D volumetric objects. We compared the performance of multiple deformable object simulations between CPU and GPU to analyze the effectiveness of parallel processing using GLSL. Moreover, we measured the computation time of bounding box-based collision detection to show that collision detection can be processed in real-time. The experiments using 3D volumetric models with 10K faces showed the GPU-based parallel simulation improves performance by 98% over the CPU-based simulation, and the overall steps including collision detection and rendering could be processed in real-time frame rate of 218.11 FPS.