Physics-based Sphere Packing for Lagrangian Mesh Morphing
Organizations: Columbia University
Abstract
This paper studies tetrahedral meshes as the body representation for differentiable simulation and computational design. Fixed-connectivity meshes degrade under large morphs, while remeshing from scratch discards node correspondence. We present JamTet, a physics-based sphere-packing framework for volumetric meshing and morphing. We contribute (i) a GPU-parallel mesher combining octree-hierarchical packing with constrained Delaunay tetrahedralization, producing more uniform element volumes than TetGen and fTetWild; (ii) Lagrangian mesh morphing that preserves interior-node identities by re-equilibrating the same spheres within changing shapes and rebuilding the boundary and connectivity, remaining inversion-free where fixed-connectivity and TetSphere meshes invert; and (iii) a differentiable GPU simulator in JAX, with mass-spring edges and a volumetric Neo-Hookean term, integrated with mesh morphing in a design pipeline. In soft-robot morphology design experiments, interior-node gradients improve swimming fitness by 0.73-1.07 over a matched surface-only variant, while voxelized versions of the same designs yield 32-63% lower fitness. These results establish sphere packing as a practical volumetric mesh representation for gradient-based shape optimization. Code and media: under review.
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Appendix figures & tables6 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Mesh | Nodes | Tets | Forward (s) | Steps/s | With gradient (s) | Memory (MiB) |
| Capsule, 1k | 1,680 | 7,954 | 0.40 | 60,600 | 3.56 | 654 / 1,678 |
| Capsule, 8k | 10,768 | 56,438 | 0.79 | 30,200 | 6.28 | 656 / 8,852 |
| Bunny, 64k | 77,726 | 425,192 | 2.27 | 10,600 | – | 760 / – |
| Structure | Mesh | (mJ) | (mJ) | |
| Cantilever, 1:1:20 | ours | 210.86 | 139.10 | |
| Cantilever, 1:1:4 | ours | 1.86 | 1.28 | |
| TetGen | 1.85 | 1.27 | ||
| fTetWild | 1.83 | 1.26 | ||
| Clamped both ends, 1:1:20 | ours | 3.68 | 2.56 | |
| I-beam cantilever, 1:1:20 | ours | 330.39 | 217.64 |