MPM Lite: Linear Kernels and Integration without Particles

We introduce MPM Lite, a hybrid Lagrangian/Eulerian method that eliminates the need for particle-based quadrature at solve time. Standard Material Point Method (MPM) practices suffer from a performance bottleneck where expensive implicit solves are proportional to particle-per-cell (PPC) counts due to the the choices of particle-based quadrature and wide-stencil kernels. By contrast, MPM Lite treats particles primarily as carriers of kinematic state and material history. Conceptualizing the background Cartesian grid as a voxel hexahedral mesh, we resample particle states onto fixed-location quadrature points using efficient, compact linear kernels. This architectural shift allows force assembly and the entire time-integration process to proceed without accessing particles, thus making the solver's complexity independent of the particle count. At the core of our method is a novel stress transfer and stretch reconstruction strategy. To avoid non-physical averaging of deformation gradients, we resample the extensive Kirchhoff stress and derive a rotation-free deformation reference solution, which naturally supports an optimization-based incremental potential formulation. Consequently, MPM Lite can be implemented as modular resampling units coupled with an FEM-style integration module, enabling the direct use of off-the-shelf nonlinear solvers, preconditioners, and unambiguous boundary conditions. We demonstrate through extensive experiments that MPM Lite preserves the robustness and versatility of traditional MPM across diverse materials while delivering significant speedups in implicit settings while simultaneously improving explicit ones. Project page: https://mpmlite.github.io.