What is mpm-lite?

MPM Lite is research code released alongside a SIGGRAPH 2026 paper about simulating physical materials for computer graphics and animation. MPM stands for material point method, a technique used to simulate things like snow, elastic bodies, and other deformable materials in a physics engine. Traditionally these simulations rely on a large number of particles to track how the material moves, and this project's contribution is a way to do the same integration using linear kernels instead, removing the need for those particle based quadrature points at solve time. The repository is meant to be a reference implementation so other researchers and developers can reproduce the results from the paper rather than a general purpose simulation library for production use. It uses Python and manages dependencies with a tool called uv, which is a modern package manager for Python projects. Getting started means cloning the repository and running one command to install the required packages. The project ships with several demo simulations. Three 3D demos show a wheel, noodle like shapes, and snow, each runnable as a separate module once dependencies are installed. There is also a 2D demo that is a single self contained file showing a simulation of pure elastic behavior with a small graphical interface, which needs one extra package for the window and graphics handling. The README is fairly sparse beyond installation and running the demos. It does not describe the internal code structure, file layout, or how to adapt the method to new scenarios, and it does not mention testing or a license. It closes with acknowledgements to the funding bodies behind the research and a citation block for anyone who wants to reference the paper in their own academic work. Overall this is a niche, academic tool aimed at people already working in physics based animation or computer graphics research rather than a broadly usable software product.