Car damage model

Well, I believe you can find all you'll ever need on FEA in the respective wikipedia page. There seems to be plenty of reference to open source projects and other methods as well.

I must tell you, though, that I doubt whether something like this is actually feasible in realtime (from the experience I have with a couple of FE analysis programmes)
You'll definitely need a decent proxy mesh to work with, and in the end you'll just have to "cheat" in order to replicate the damage on your actual model. (I mean that, if you're going to cheat anyway, you may as well lose the FEA)

Furthermore, even if you manage to get a decent FEA in realtime, don't forget that -since you seem to want all the realism you can get- you'll also have to deal with problems such as calculation of new deformed volume, calculation of the new distribution of mass (density changes), calculation of new inertial tensor, calculation of new center of weight...
Of course, all these won't be on a "per frame" basis, but it goes to show that you may need to take into account more factors than what you planned.


It sure sounds interesting though... Good luck.