A peridynamic perspective on spring-mass fracture

The application of spring-mass systems to the animation of brittle fracture is revisited. The motivation arises from the recent popularity of peridynamics in the computational physics community. Peridynamic systems can be regarded as spring-mass systems with two specific properties. First, spring forces are based on a simple strain metric, thereby decoupling spring stiffness from spring length. Second, masses are connected using a distance-based criterion. The relatively large radius of influence typically leads to a few hundred springs for every mass point. Spring-mass systems with these properties are shown to be simple to implement, trivially parallelized, and well-suited to animating brittle fracture.