Rigid-Body Fracture Sound with Precomputed Soundbanks

• Changxi Zheng
• Doug L. James

We propose a physically based algorithm for synthesizing sounds synchronized with brittle fracture animations. Motivated by laboratory experiments, we approximate brittle fracture sounds using time-varying rigid-body sound models. We extend methods for fracturing rigid materials by proposing a fast quasistatic stress solver to resolve near-audio-rate fracture events, energy-based fracture pattern modeling and estimation of “crack”-related fracture impulses. Multipole radiation models provide scalable sound radiation for complex debris and level of detail control. To reduce sound model generation costs for complex fracture debris, we propose Precomputed Rigid-Body Soundbanks comprised of precomputed ellipsoidal sound proxies. Examples and experiments are presented that demonstrate plausible and affordable brittle fracture sounds.

• SIGGRAPH Paper (High-res, 25M PDF)
• SIGGRAPH Paper (Low-res, 1.7M PDF)
• Supplemental Video (H.264 60FPS 320M)
• Supplemental Video (H.264 30FPS 211M)
• NSF Project: Sound Rendering for Physically Based Simulation

Changxi Zheng and Doug L. James, Rigid-Body Fracture Sound with Precomputed Soundbanks, ACM Transaction on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2010), 29(3), July 2009.

• Animation data for the Table example (See README in the tarball for usage of data)

• The National Science Foundation (HCC-0905506)
• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
• Pixar Animation Studios
• Intel Corporation
• Advanced CAE Research
• Vision Research
• Autodesk Maya
• Yafaray Free Open-source Raytracing Engine
• Blender Free Open-source 3D Creation Suite

• The Cornell Chronicle
• Slashdot