Go Green: General Regularized Green's Functions for Elasticity

The fundamental solutions (Green’s functions) of linear elasticity for an infinite and isotropic media are ubiquitous in interactive graphics applications that cannot afford the computational costs of volumetric meshing and finite-element simulation. For instance, the recent work of de Goes and James [2017] leveraged these Green’s functions to formulate sculpting tools capturing in real-time broad and physically-plausible deformations more intuitively and realistically than traditional editing brushes. In this paper, we extend this family of Green’s functions by exploiting the anisotropic behavior of general linear elastic materials, where the relationship between stress and strain in the material depends on its orientation. While this more general framework prevents the existence of analytical expressions for its fundamental solutions, we show that a finite sum of spherical harmonics can be used to decompose a Green’s function, which can be further factorized into directional, radial, and material-dependent terms. From such a decoupling, we show how to numerically derive sculpting brushes to generate anisotropic deformation and finely control their falloff profiles in real-time.