There is so an intense demand for simulators. With Raphael, I work on real-time realistic rendering of the liver surface and the instruments effects on it. To be noted that the two first aspects are motivated by the fact that texture and reflects streching contain alot of information about the object relief. The pattern is generated using Voronoi diagrams, the distortion minimisation use a spring-based relaxation. The problem consists in getting with texture location is under the mouse and how much texture deformation exists there, so that the spot can be drawn in the texture in such a way that it appears regular when mapped.
Liver mesh at a given simulation time step.
With my collegue Marie-Paule Cani , we published at Siggraph'99 a methode for texturing without distortion . Thanks to it, we can now texturate correctly the skin grain. We use for this animated textures. Moreover, reflects are very sensitive to small pressure changes, thus provide an extra clue about the contact and the stress. Accepted for publication in The Visual Computer.