Artist Controlled Fracture Design Using Impurity Maps

When an object breaks, simulating evolution of fracture as per artist control while maintaining physical realism and plausibility is a challenging problem due to different complex material properties of real world objects. In this work, we present impurity maps as a way to guide fracture paths for both brittle and ductile fracture. We develop a novel probabilistic damage mechanics to model fracture in materials with impurities, using a random graph-based formulation in conjunction with graph-based FEM. An artist created map allows us to selectively distribute the impurities in the material, to weaken the object in those specific regions where the imperfections are added. During simulation, the presence of impurities guide the cracks that develop such that the fracture pattern closely follows the impurity map. We simulate artist-controlled fractures on different materials to demonstrate the potency of our method.