Fast Quadrangular Mass-Spring Systems using Red-Black Ordering

Abstract

We introduce a practical iterative solver for mass-spring systems which can be trivially mapped to massively parallel architectures, in particular GPUs.We employ our solver for the interactive animation of virtual cloth and show that it is computationally fast, robust and scalable, making it suitable for real-time graphics applications. Under the assumption that the input system is represented by a quadrangular network of masses connected by springs, we first partition the particles into two independent sets. Then, during the animation, the dynamics of all the particles belonging to each set is computed in parallel. This enables a full Gauss-Seidel iteration in just two parallel steps, leading to an approximated solution of large mass-spring systems in a few milliseconds. We use our solver to accelerate the solution of the popular Projective Dynamics framework, and compare it with other common iterative solvers in the current literature.