Gallery¶

The IPC Toolkit is used by a variety of projects across academia and industry for collision handling in physical simulations. If your project uses the IPC Toolkit, please let us know and we’ll add it here!

Trash Compactor Simulated in PolyFEM, this "trash compactor" scenario tests the limits of contact handling and mesh stability. Diverse geometries are crushed into a perfect cube, demonstrating the solver's ability to maintain numerical stability even under massive topological distortion.

Disk Rollers An advanced demonstration of frictional contact and large-strain deformation within PolyFEM. This simulation features a deformable hyperelastic disk being captured and pulled through a narrow gap by two counter-rotating rigid rollers.

Golf Ball High-velocity impact analysis of a golf ball striking a stiff boundary. Using PolyFEM, this video visualizes internal stress distribution during extreme compression. The simulation accurately captures the transition from kinetic energy to elastic potential energy and the subsequent rebound.

Character Animation This PolyFEM simulation features an elephant with scripted walking motion, using a dynamic color map to track internal stress as it moves. A standout detail is the intersection-free contact, ensuring the trunk fluidly interacts with the legs and ground without any mesh clipping. It’s a great example of how the solver handles complex, self-touching geometry with precision.

Simulation Frameworks¶

PolyFEM	A polyvalent C++ and Python finite element library supporting a wide range of PDEs including elasticity, Stokes, and Navier-Stokes. PolyFEM uses the IPC Toolkit for contact handling in its simulations.
SfePy	Simple Finite Elements in Python — a software for solving systems of coupled partial differential equations by the finite element method in 1D, 2D, and 3D. It can be used both as a black-box PDE solver and as a Python package for building custom applications.
FEDOO	A free open-source Python finite element library mainly dedicated to mechanical problems, including support for finite strain, composites, elasto-plastic laws, homogenization, and 2D/3D contact with self-contact.
Rigid IPC	Robust, intersection-free simulations of rigid bodies. This is the reference implementation of the SIGGRAPH 2021 paper Intersection-free Rigid Body Dynamics, and uses the IPC Toolkit for common IPC functions.

Papers Using IPC Toolkit¶

The following is a non-exhaustive list of publications that use or build upon the IPC Toolkit:

Intersection-free Rigid Body Dynamics [Ferguson et al., 2021]
High-Order Incremental Potential Contact for Elastodynamic Simulation on Curved Meshes [Ferguson et al., 2023]
In-Timestep Remeshing for Contacting Elastodynamics [Ferguson et al., 2023]
Efficient Incremental Potential Contact for Actuated Face Simulation [Li et al., 2023]
Computational Exploration of Multistable Elastic Knots [Vidulis et al., 2023]
Differentiable solver for time-dependent deformation problems with contact [Huang et al., 2024]
A systematic comparison between FEBio and PolyFEM for biomechanical systems [Martin et al., 2024]
Geometric Contact Potential [Huang et al., 2025]
Adopting Research in Production at Netflix Animation Studios [Andrus, 2025]
ANIME-Rod: Adjustable Nonlinear Isotropic Materials for Elastic Rods [Chen et al., 2025]
Intersection-Free Garment Retargeting [Huang et al., 2025]

Add Your Project¶

If you are using the IPC Toolkit in your research or software, we would love to feature your work here. Please open a discussion post or submit a pull request adding your project to this page.