Fast penetration depth computation for physically-based animation

We present a novel and fast algorithm to compute penetration depth (PD) between two polyhedral models for physically-based animation. Given two overlapping polyhedra, it computes the minimal translation distance to separate them using a combination of object-space and image-space techniques. The algorithm computes pairwise Minkowski sums of decomposed convex pieces and performs a closest point query using rasterization hardware. It uses bounding volume hierarchies, object-space and image-space culling algorithms to further accelerate the computation and refines the estimated PD in a hierarchical manner. We demonstrate its application to contact response computation and a time-stepping method for dynamic simulation.