Bullet Maya physics plugin based on Nima, feedback wanted

[Erwin Coumans]

There is an option to add Bullet support for the open source (MIT license) Maya physics plugin.

Originally this plugin called 'Nima' was developed by Feelingsoftware and sponsored by Ageia, but its development seem to be halted recently.

Is there interest for a Maya plugin, that allows physics modeling, Bullet physics preview and COLLADA physics export?
Any comments,feedback welcome,
Erwin

[melax]

... snip ... Any comments,feedback welcome,
Erwin

With their internal Maya expertise, Feeling software was able to put a good user interface on top of NIMA that was consistent with how everything else works in Maya. Apparenly Maya's internal physics was a few years old and had not been upgraded. Hence it wasn't able to do what today's physics engines can do in terms of features, robustness and quantity. After Christian first made the plugin he seemed to get a lot of interest in NIMA. There was a number of Maya artists in the movie/tv industry that took advantage of it. Perhaps even moreso than game studios since some movie houses dont have too many game programmers sitting around ready to write custom plugins for the art guys. As for game studios there was interest and usage, but artists usually have a pipeline ready where they can quickly export a model and simulate it in the game engine. Some studios even have custom "character tools" where they assign physics properties to models only after exported from maya. Although, imho, being able to do things right inside the art-tool is always better for authoring. I would suggest contacting Feeling software and asking about the status of the project. Also ping the art community - or get an artist coworker to do that for you.

I'm not speaking on behalf of anyone or any company, but I feel that I should mention that by sponsoring NIMA, I believe Ageia was hoping to promote physx. Having NIMA open source would enable companies to extend and improve the interface. I am not suggesting one way or another that you proceed or dont proceed with the project. Personally, I like to see the advancement of open source physics tool related development. In fact, if the collada export path continues to improve then your efforts could benefit physx users.

If NIMA development has been halted, it could be partly due to the main developer becoming a new Dad recently.

just my 2c

[Szabolcs]

Hi Erwin,

Our studio heavily used NIMA for rigid body simulations and while there were some flaws with the plugin (mostly constraint related issues) it was a very great product and quite well designed from the implementation point of view. The end of its development is a very serious issue for us (and I guess for quite a lot of other companies using it) so any other solution replacing it would be a godsend.
Although Christian wrote about the lack of interest in the projec,t I guess its more about the financial part and not the actual user interest. I've heard quite a lot about the plugin at various places so the interest is definitely there. And having an open source dynamics engine and an open source application interface would be a really great and open solution for a lot of studios. Even after rigid bodies are added to the nucleus framework an open source system has a lot of additional potential.

So to cut things short: yes, keep up the good work and don't think twice about a maya plugin!

Cheers,
Horvátth Szabolcs
Digic Pictures

ps. found the forum by pure accident, first post ever, don't know much about the rest of the topics.

[DrakkenWulf]

I'm also very interested in this, using Bullet, Maya and Collada for my latest app. While I do have my own trimesh-based collada reader, it would be infinitely helpful to have cylinder and other primitives besides the plain cube and sphere. Not to mention some good interactive constraint support to make scene setup a lot easier.

[BruceM]

Do you have the sources for NIMA? For which version?

I can't seem to find them via the Feeling Software site any longer.

- Bruce

[eddybox]

I'm still interested in this as well.

Cheers,
Eddy

PS. Bruce, for more info (and links to source), check this topic: http://www.bulletphysics.com/Bullet/php ... hilit=nima

[Erwin Coumans]

Ageia open sourced the latest Nima plugin here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/nimaplugin/

Not sure how it compares to the one available a while back,
Erwin