Real-time simulation and visualization of cutting wounds

Abstract

Many modern computer games and medical computer simulations feature skin injuries such as cutting wounds. These fields often approach this topic in different ways, where medical simulations commonly have a minimal visualization, and most games rely heavily on artistic influence. As far as we know, no methods currently exist that combine mesh cutting simulation with skin visualization techniques in order to synthesize cutting wounds during runtime. Previous literature fails to describe a complete remeshing scheme that can handle arbitrary cuts while maintaining the topology and parameterization of an input surface mesh. Additionally, the appearance and synthesis of cutting wounds has not been sufficiently addressed. In this thesis, we explore the feasibility of constructing a damage model that simulates and visualizes natural-looking cutting wounds by generating new geometry and textures maps on the fly. We describe a cutting simulation approach which merges a cutting line into the mesh surface that is subsequently opened to reveal interior wound geometry generated at runtime. For visualizing the surface injury we generate a wound texture during runtime and propose an extension to subsurface scattering to locally discolor the skin surface around the cut. Our approach is lightweight: using a mid-range desktop computer, cuts can be created in about 45 milliseconds on average, and a typical frame is rendered in about 2.5 milliseconds. We think that our approach can be attractive for increasing the realism of cutting wounds in real-time applications without having to rely on specific artistic input.