Physics Simulation Forum

I’ve been looking at Bullet in Maya (just starting, so I am new to this). I’m a little puzzled why there are basically two plugins now-- Dynamica vs MayaBullet-- and not sure which is better for my needs.

If I understand right, Dynamica appears to be the original Bullet plugin for Maya, distributed with Bullet, and is open source. I realize it was originally written at Disney and thus I'd guess it is probably more focused on production, less on games.

But what is the more recent looking MayaBullet (bullet.so) plugin for? This looks like it was written by Autodesk, with support from AMD-- and is only available with a support subscription to Maya. And, despite the press release saying it’s a “fully open source” plugin, it doesn’t appear to be-- at least I couldn’t find code for it in the Maya devkit or inside Bullet’s releases. I feel after playing with it like it might be more stable, and may have better soft body support. (I can't even find paintable weight maps for Dynamica's soft body implementation). But it also seems to be little known, and little talked about, and pretty much brand new compared to Dynamica.

Why was the new plugin written, rather than trying to improve Dynamica?

If there’s anyone who knows and can enlighten me on the topic, it would be much appreciated! Thank you!


PS, I should add, when I said that the press release said the new plugin was open source, I was referring specifically to this quote from a piece on AMD and the new MayaBullet plugin:

http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/a ... laug11.pdf
“… The performance of AMD FirePro professional graphics hardware combined with a FULLY OPEN SOURCE Bullet plug-in for Autodesk Maya software helps accomplish that goal.”

Dynamica is the open source plugin by Disney and it is a community project, accepting contributions and support over these Bullet forums. http://dynamica.googlecode.com has source code that compiles for pretty much any Maya version, and some precompiled installers are there too.

BulletMaya is proprietary by Autodesk, it ships with Maya 2012 Subscription Advantage Pack and with the regular upcoming Maya 2013 release. It is not open source and if features are lacking you cannot fix them yourself (no source code).

The main focus of Bullet and Dynamica is rigid body dynamics. MayaBullet has some better cloth authoring, but cloth is just a rudimentary feature of Bullet. The cloth OpenCL acceleration is very limited and still experimental.

If you can, try both and see which fits you better. My personal preference is Dynamica, because it is open source under a permissive software license.

Hope this helps,
Erwin

Autodesk would much rather work on something they can profit from and keep proprietary than contribute to an open source project. It has nothing to do with what's best for the customers. That's just the way things are. (most likely many companies exploit Bullet for profit and never contribute back fixes and improvements they've made)

Just wanted to say thanks to Erwin for clarifying that! I couldn't find a clear answer on this topic anywhere else.