Implementing VBD Damping Properly

Vertex Block Descent (VBD) is a physics solver we published at SIGGRAPH 2024 for elastic body dynamics. It offers unconditional stability, excellent GPU parallelism, and fast convergence to implicit Euler solutions. While the paper covers the formulation comprehensively, actually implementing VBD correctly—especially the damping—turns out to be subtler than it first appears. This post discusses…