This paper presents a technique for modeling and animating fiber-like objects such as sea anemones tentacles in real-time. Each fiber is described by a generalized cylinder defined around an articulated skeleton. The dynamics of each individual fiber is controlled by a physically based simulation that updates the position of the skeleton's frames over time. We take into account the forces generated by the surrounding fluid as well as a stiffness function describing the bending behavior of the fiber. High level control of the animation is achieved through the use of four types of singularities to describe the three-dimensional continuous velocity field representing the fluid. We thus animate hundreds of fibers by key-framing only a small number of singularities. We apply this algorithm on a seascape composed of many sea anemones. We also show that our algorithm is more general and can be applied to other types of objects composed of fibers such as seagrasses.

@InProceedings\{AL09,
  author       = "Aliaga, Juan José and Larboulette, Caroline",
  title        = "Physically Based Animation of Sea Anemones in Real-Time",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of the 25th Spring Conference on Computer Graphics",
  month        = "apr",
  year         = "2009",
  publisher    = "ACM SIGGRAPH",
  url          = "http://gmrv.es/Publications/2009/AL09"
}