This tutorial presents the different components required in real-time physical-based simulations. It covers a broad scope of topics while discussing a few recent developments, allowing attendees to see and understand what is currently possible to integrate physics within a virtual environment. We focus on practical methods, as implemented in publicly available toolkits. It is mainly intended as an introduction for anyone interested in integrating physical behaviors in virtual environments, but the recently published interactive simulation technics that are presented might also be of interest to more experienced participants.
Jeremie Allard – Research Scientist at Alcove, INRIA Lille
Francois Faure – Assistant Professor at Evasion, Grenoble Universities.
Erwin Coumans – Simulation team lead at Sony Computer Entertainment America
Kenny Erleben – Assistant Professor at DIKU, University of Copenhagen
Richard Tonge – Senior Software Engineer at NVIDIA
Quote from a forum posting: “This is an adventure game. Without going into a full description of the gameplay, we specifically used Bullet to allow the player to free-draw new static & dynamic objects, to modify the levels and solve puzzles.”
For 8192 fast moving objects on NVidia 8800 GTX, Intel Core 2 3Ghz: CUDA (btCudaBroadphase) 6ms, OPCODE Array SAP 37ms, Bullet dynamic BVH (AABB tree, btDbvtBroadphase): 12ms. When nothing moves, the CUDA broadphase still takes 4ms, whereas SAP and dynamic BVH (btDbvtBroadphase) are practically 0ms. For even larger amounts of moving objects (64k) the CUDA still performs fine, whereas SAP/dynamic BVH grind to a halt. This makes it a good candidate broadphase for environments with huge destruction.
Developing Games with Open Source Technologies: Full-day Tutorial
Monday, September 15th Austin Convetion Center, Room 9C
11:00am – 11:50am: Tumbling, falling and breaking: Bullet open source, professional physics engine
Open source technologies bring cutting edge innovation, source code accessibility, rich community support, and a pricetag that can’t be beat to developers in every industry — including the online game industry. In this one day mini-track you will learn first hand from leading game developers and technology providers about open source game engines, tools, and server technologies that are changing the economics of online game development today.
This Dynamica Plugin is used in Disney’s upcoming 3D animated movie Bolt, for example in the peanuts shot below.
Thanks to Nicola Candussi and Arthur Shek from Disney for this contribution!
Several bug fixes and contributions related to inertia tensor, memory leaks etc.
Thanks to Ole K and several other contributors.
Added btCudaBroadphase in Extras/CUDA: some preliminary research into accelerating Bullet using CUDA.
Thanks to the particle demo from the NVidia CUDA SDK.
Updated CDTestFramework, with latest version of OPCODE Array SAP. See Extras/CDTestFramework
Thanks to Pierre Terdiman for the update
ForkLiftDemo has been finished, finally!
Improved performance for btDbvtBroadphase.
Thanks to Nathanael Presson again, for all his work.
OLPC is hosting a Physics Game Jam in Boston from August 29 to 31.
This is a team based rapid game development competition based on creating a physics game for OLPC XO laptops in 48 hours. Remote entries are allowed, and there will be prizes for the winners. PyBox2D is the main physics library that will be used, but anything open source that will run on the XO is fine.
There will be programming workshops such as developing in Sugar, using PyBox2D, and integrating computer vision with physics, so prior experience is not a requirement.
Tony Mullen reported that his new book Bounce, Tumble and Splash! Simulating the Physical World with Blender (Sybex) is out:
“The book covers all of Blender’s simulation functionality in depth including fluid, soft body, cloth, rigid body, particles, hair and much more. This is the first time much of this functionality has been documented in print, so I really hope that the book will help to give these powerful features a much wider audience.
I took a bunch of snapshots to give people an idea of how the books look inside and out, and you can check those out here:
