A mediation paper, written from interviews of Florence Bertails-Descoubes, Bernard Brogliato and Gilles Daviet, traces back the success of nonsmooth mechanics for handling contact and friction in feature film movies. Nonsmooth mechanics was especially developed thanks to the pioneering work of Jean-Jacques Moreau in Montpellier, France (mainly for applications to fluids and granular systems), before being further investigated in the context of fiber assemblies for computer graphics by the Bipop team in Grenoble. These researches are nowadays pursued in the Elan team.
More infos in the Inria paper (in French):
https://inria.fr/fr/modelisation-mecanique-simulation-fibres