ElasticKnots

A framework to simulate knotted elastic rods with self-contacts.

This is the codebase associated to the SIGGRAPH 2023 paper Computational Exploration of Multistable Elastic Knots.

To know more about our research, please visit the project webpage.

Getting Started

C++ Code Dependencies

To install the required dependencies, please follow the instructions from https://github.com/jpanetta/ElasticRods

Obtaining the Code

Clone this repository recursively so that its submodules are also downloaded:

git clone git@github.com:EPFL-LGG/ElasticKnots.git --recurse-submodules

Python Dependencies

The file environment.yml contains all the Python dependencies needed to run the demo Jupyter notebooks. Create the conda environment ElasticKnots

conda env create -f environment.yml

and activate it (make sure to do this before compiling the Python bindings):

conda activate ElasticKnots

Building

Build the C++ code and its Python bindings:

python setup.py

Alternatively, you can manually build the project using cmake and your favorite build system. For example, with ninja:

cd ElasticKnots
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -GNinja
ninja

Running the Jupyter Notebooks

Launch Jupyter lab from the root directory:

jupyter lab

Now try opening and running an example notebook, e.g., python/Demo-1-Simulation.ipynb to test the simulation framework.