Physics-Based Simulation of Contact-Induced Facial Wrinkling
2026-07-06 • Graphics
Graphics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors created a computer simulation to mimic how human facial skin wrinkles when it gets pressed or stretched. They consider how skin layers and their attachments to muscles and bones affect wrinkle patterns over time. Their model includes the skin's stretchy and slow-relaxing properties, allowing wrinkles to form, persist, and fade realistically. They tested their method on fake and real examples, showing it can produce believable, time-consistent wrinkles during skin contact.
finite element methodviscoelasticityskin biomechanicswrinkling patternsprismatic solid-shell elementsskin ligamentsnonlinear materialcontact mechanicsanatomical constraints
Authors
Juan Sebastian Montes Maestre, Ladislav Kavan, Edmond Boyer, Ryan Goldade, Stelian Coros, Bernhard Thomaszewski
Abstract
Facial skin dynamics are inherently challenging to simulate due to a combination of geometric, material, and anatomical complexities. Human skin is a nonlinear layered material with spatially heterogeneous attachments to the underlying tissues. During contact events, localized compression and shear induce mechanical instabilities, leading to fine-scale wrinkling patterns governed by a delicate interplay of geometry, boundary conditions, and through-the-thickness stresses. We present a finite element framework to simulate contact-induced wrinkling of facial skin. We model skin as a viscoelastic material with time-dependent relaxation that governs the rate, persistence, and damping of wrinkle formation. We employ high-order prismatic solid-shell elements to resolve through-thickness stresses and high-frequency deformation modes. Central to our approach, we introduce a continuum-based formulation of skin ligaments to model heterogeneous skin attachments and provide anatomically inspired mobility constraints. These skin ligaments control the formation and appearance of facial wrinkles by modulating their amplitude, wavelength, and spatial distribution. We evaluate our method on a set of synthetic examples and compare simulations with real-world footage. These results demonstrate that our skin model produces temporally coherent and visually realistic wrinkle patterns during transient contact.