Tutorials

Step-by-step notebooks that walk through common SimKit workflows. They live in the simkit-tutorials repository and are rendered here — kept in a separate repo so cloning simkit stays lightweight.

• 0 · Discretizing a Deformation — the Finite Element Method
• 1 · Building the Deformation Gradient
• 2 · Deformation Gradient Intuition
• 3 · Elastic Energy Intuition
• 4 · Elastostatics as a Minimization Problem
• 5 · Solving the Minimization: Newton vs. Gradient Descent
• 6 · Why Line Search Matters
• 7 · Time Integration: Forward Euler, Backward Euler, BDF2
• 8 · Contact: a Ball Pushing into a Soft Block
• 9 · Contact: Dropping an Elastic Block on the Floor
• 10 · Resolution and Cost: the Accuracy/Speed Trade-off
• 11 · Mass Springs: from Hooke’s Law to a Sagging Cable
• 12 · Quadratic (P2) finite elements
• 13 · Outline Areas: the shoelace formula, its gradient, and its Hessian
• 14 · Bending Stiffness: a Mass-Spring Beam that Resists Bending
• 15 · Pneumatic Actuation: Inflating a Chamber to Steer a Beam
• 16 · Mass-Spring Actuation: Pulling Surface Tendons to Steer a Beam
• 17 · Skinning Eigenmodes: a Subspace that Can Rotate
• 18 · Rotation–Strain Coordinates: Rescuing a Linear Mode
• 19 · Compressed Vibration Modes: trading global modes for local ones
• 20 · Quadratic (P2) finite elements in 3D — a beam sagging under gravity
• 21 · Block Coordinate Descent vs. Newton — minimizing ARAP energy
• 22 · Fast Mass Springs — a constant-Hessian implicit solver
• 23 · Fast Complementary Dynamics — secondary motion that never fights the rig
• 24 · Subspace Mixed FEM (MFEM)
• 25 · Modal Muscle Actuation
• This is a script detailing how offline tutorials should work.
• Don’t do the rest after but at a high level here they are
• SimKit Tutorials