[Agentlien]

This reminds me of when I worked on surgical training simulations back in 2011-2015.

In some exercises most of the scene was made up of soft body objects containing millions of triangles which could be deformed and even destroyed - cutting any random edges.

The simulation was handled by creating a coarser mesh of tetrahedra which were treated as deformable physical objects and skinning the triangles to these. Cutting simply removed entire tetrahedra and the triangles were reskinned to the nearest one or simply removed if none were close enough.

[a_e_k]

Neat! You might be interested to know then that at the same conference, HPG 2026 [1], that this tetrahedral animation ray tracing work was presented at, the last of the 14 papers presented was on that sort of soft body simulation for surgical training: "Real-Time Dissectible Deformable Models Using High-Performance Breakable Shape Constraints". (Paper [2]; Presentation [3]).

[1] https://www.highperformancegraphics.org/2026/schedule/

[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3820013

[3] https://www.youtube.com/live/vTUdO2A73i0?si=Hy6zle7EtWp7rL60...