Maya Custom Rigid Body Node

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Mortal2God
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Joined: Sat Dec 22, 2012 3:01 pm

Maya Custom Rigid Body Node

Post by Mortal2God »

Hi everyone,

I have recently joined the forums and I am thoroughly enjoying the discussions, really useful and informative indeed for people new to physics simulation like myself.

I would like to apologize in advance if this is the wrong place to post this question. The question is mainly for people with Maya (or similar packages) API experience.

My question is related to the process of creating a custom rigid body node to work within Maya. I want to practice and develop my physics programming skills so I decided to take on this task. I have experience with the C++ API but not so much with the Python one other than internal UI things, therefore I decided to use Python to tackle this task as I believe it will be faster to create some sort of a prototype.

Would anyone with any insight in this area be able to give me a breakdown of how to approach this task?

More specifically:

1. What kind of node would a rigid body need to be? I am aware that you can have a deformer node for example, will a rigid body be based on that on something else?

2. I noticed that Maya uses the concept of fields for adding physics such as gravity etc, do I need to develop a custom field somehow to work along the rigid body node?

3. Any examples out there that I can have a look and gain some more knowledge from?

4. How do I go about testing physics code within Maya?

For example my primary goal would be to have a sphere, or a mesh be affected by gravity then add collision and more attributes like friction, velocity etc.

Just to clarify, I am mostly after on how to tackle this in terms of Maya and not the actual physics code.

Thanks for all your help and time in advance and I wish you all Happy Christmas!

Mortal2God
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