Cute balloons with thickness

Abstract

Based on the finite element method, we present a simple volume-preserved thin shell deformation algorithm to simulate the process of inflating a balloon. Different from other thin shells, the material of balloons has special features: large stretch, small bend and shear, and incompressibility. Previous deformation methods often focus on typical three-dimensional models or thin plate models such as cloth. The rest thin shell methods are complex or ignore the special features of thin shells especially balloons.We modify the triangle element to simple threeprism element, ignore bending and shearing deformation, and use volume preservation algorithm to match the incompressibility of balloons. Simple gas model is used, which interacts with shells to make the balloons inflated. Different balloon examples have been tested in our experiments and the results are compared with those of other methods. The experiments show that our algorithm is simple and effective.