Bounce, Tumble and Splash! coming soon

[bugman_2000]

Hi Everybody,

I wanted to let people know that my new book Bounce, Tumble and Splash! Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D is available for pre-order on Amazon. The actual release of the book is somewhat dependent on the timing of the 2.46 Blender release, which will also be included on a CD with the book, but it should follow that release fairly quickly. Amazon has it listed as June, and I think it could even be out sooner.

You can see more about the book here at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Bounce-Tumble-Spl ... 0470192801

The book covers all of Blender's various simulation capabilities in depth: particles and hair (the new implementation), soft bodies and cloth, fluid, rigid bodies, and touches on a wide variety of other related topics that don't get much attention elsewhere such as modifiers, PyDrivers, node-based materials, plant simulation and more. A full chapter is devoted to working with Bullet physics in Blender.

I've put together a short preview video to give people a sense of what they'll find in the book. You can take a look at that here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3du8ksOm9Fo

A higher res (slightly different) version can be found here:

http://uploader.polorix.net//files/421/ ... Teaser.avi

Finally, thanks very much to Bullet's own Erwin Coumans, who has graciously agreed to provide a foreword to the book!

Tony

[TrueFlection]

One of best I have seen from the physics side of Blender and and I have to say that bullet is great .
I have a questions : Is the ragdoll falling part in realtime(Blender Game Engine)?
and is most of that stuff in the vid possible in realtime?

[bugman_2000]

Hi,

The ragdoll in the video uses Ipo Curve animation based on real-time ragdoll physics. It's an example of how to use Bullet physics to influence an armature for animation. So the movement you see there is real time speed, but the specific use would be for rendered animation.

As for the other effects, I'd have to say the majority are not possible in real time at present. The tumbling blocks example is, but the fluid, cloth and soft body effects are not. Particle effects depend a lot on the specific effect and how the particles are instantiated. Mostly the particle calculations themselves can be done in real time. The book does not cover using particles in the Game Engine, though, which is quite different from using particles in Blender itself.

Hope this was helpful!

Tony