Patent Document ID: 9892539
Application ID: 14057904
Patent Flag: 1

Claim One:
1. A method, comprising: receiving an animation rig with a plurality of rig parameters, the rig parameters defining a deformation space for an attached surface mesh, the attached surface mesh comprising a plurality of nodes, the animation rig further comprising a volumetric mesh comprising a plurality of internal nodes and a correspondence set defining the connectivity among the plurality of internal nodes and a plurality of surface vertices of the attached surface mesh; receiving material stiffness data on a subset of the rig parameters, the material stiffness data defining a stiffness scale value for each of the subset of the rig parameters, wherein the stiffness scale value is relative to a stiffness of a homogeneous material chosen for a finite element method model derived from the attached surface mesh; using the volumetric mesh to compute internal deformations and corresponding elastic energies; using the rig and the material stiffness data to influence a physics-based simulation of the effects of one or more of gravity, inertia, and penalty-collisions, wherein the physics-based simulation of the effects of one or more of gravity, inertia, and penalty-collisions is constrained by the deformation space of the rig; and generating a plurality of keyframes on some or all of the parameters as a result of the physics-based simulation of the effects of one or more of gravity, inertia, and penalty-collisions; wherein the physics-based simulation comprises eliminating one or more of the plurality of surface vertices from the correspondence set such that a plurality of degrees of freedom required to compute the physics-based simulation are reduced to the subset of the rig parameters.