Repulsive Shells

This paper develops a shape space framework for collision-aware geometric modeling, where basic geometric operations automatically avoid inter-penetration. Shape spaces are a powerful tool for surface modeling, shape analysis, nonrigid motion planning, and animation, but past formulations permit nonphysical intersections. Our framework augments an existing shape space using a repulsive energy such that collision avoidance becomes a first-class property, encoded in the Riemannian metric itself. In turn, tasks like intersection-free shape interpolation or motion extrapolation amount to simply computing geodesic paths via standard numerical algorithms. To make optimization practical, we develop an adaptive collision penalty that prevents mesh self-intersection, and converges to a meaningful limit energy under refinement. The final algorithms apply to any category of shape, and do not require a dataset of examples, training, rigging, nor any other prior information. For instance, to interpolate between two shapes we need only a single pair of meshes with the same connectivity. We evaluate our method on a variety of challenging examples from modeling and animation.