Contact of a flex with `passive` collisions enabled was applied as an
explicit spring of fixed stiffness 1e4, which the timestep bounds: any
stiffness worth having oscillates faster than the step can resolve, so
the force was too soft to keep sheets apart and interpenetration was
routine.
Carry its curvature in the effective metric M + K instead, alongside the
flex's own stretch and bending stiffness. The contact block k*J^T*J is
appended to the per-vertex candidate list already assembled for the flex
stencils, so it costs additional entries in an existing matrix rather
than a new one, and the accompanying shift -h*K*v is what damps the
stiff modes. At a 2 ms timestep this holds roughly 50x the stiffness an
explicit force of the same step could.
With the timestep no longer setting the bound, the stiffness is chosen
as a natural frequency scaled by the participating vertex mass rather
than left at a fixed 1e4, so one value suits models of any scale.
Passive handling is scoped to contacts whose every dof is a flex vertex
carried by the metric: flex against flex, flex against itself, and flex
against static geometry, which contributes no dofs of its own. For those
the Hessian is assembled in full. Contact with a body that can move
would have that body's dofs dropped from it, and is left on the
constraint solver.
The feature now requires an integrator whose constraint solve runs in
that metric, and is rejected with an error otherwise.
Add model/flex/drape.xml as the example model, replacing sphere_passive,
whose contacts no longer demonstrated the feature.
Alessio
2a3554c8a3