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Physics middleware

Started by pemjahat Apr 3, 2007 at 10:21 PM 1 replies 1k views

Original Post

Apr 3, 2007 at 10:21 PM

Greetings, Hi guys who already have an experiment with the physics middleware like Ageia PhysX, Havok PhysX or any other middleware. Based on your experience which one is the easier to use / customize to meet requirement with easy integration. Like example: I using PhysX and have a problem with Animation character. Based on their sample, they only accomodate us a capsule / box shapes ( NxController ) for used to be our playable character. Which is not good enough for me, because what happen if the character want to duck, or the character want to jump and duck. I don't have any experience with other than Ageia PhysX. If you have, fell free to discuss here. Thanks for your input.

grhodes_at_work

Apr 4, 2007 at 12:53 PM

Ageia can support a more complex skeleton (as can any of the other physics middleware). They still use (or prefer to use) simple primitives such as capsule/box for collision detection because there are fast collision tests for those types of shapes. But, you certainly can model a hierarchy of those simple shapes to better model a character going through a variety of motions.

John Ratcliff has release as open source a number of tools that make it rather easy to preprocess an artist mesh for simulation with PhysX. You still have lots of work to do to couple keyframe animations with physical response. They don't provide support for keyframe animation, though their API may have some way to easily do a weighted average sum of the keyframe positions and orientations the physics-based response together.

You can find Ratcliff's code (and a GDC 2007 presentation with videos on the subject) here:

John Ratcliff's Code Suppository

You're looking for "CreateDynamics". The GDC presentation is very helpful in explaining what he's done.

pemjahat

Apr 5, 2007 at 3:31 AM

Hi Rhodes,
Thanks for the input.
Is there anyone here using Havok Physics or any other physics middleware ?

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