Game Physics Simulation

Bullet 3.x will feature a 100% GPU accelerated rigid body pipeline with various parallel broad phase algorithms, convex and concave triangle mesh and several parallel solvers. Here is a teaser video for my GPU rigid body talk at GDC 2013 this Thursday March 28, 2.30PM.

See http://schedule2013.gdconf.com/session-id/822773 for more details.

When will this be available? Soon!

The new Bullet 2.81 Physics SDK is released. It includes an Apple contribution of SIMD and Neon optimizations  for Mac OSX and iOS. Some new features include rolling friction ( so that curved shapes such as sphere, cylinders and cones will stop rolling, even on a sloped surface), a gear constraint, force and torque joint feedback, optional Coriolis forces and speculative contacts for fast moving objects. For more information and feedback see 
http://bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=8490

Bullet 2.80 includes a preview of the GPU rigid body pipeline by Takahiro Harada, running 100% on the GPU using OpenCL. You can check out the Youtube videos or slides and precompiled binaries.
A new AMD Radeon 7970 Tahiti can simulate 110k objects in real-time between 15-30 frames/second. It also works on recent NVIDIA GPUs with latest drivers.

Graham Rhodes and Anthony Hamilton contributed a Android/NEON optimized version of Sony Physics Effects, which will be used as a handheld backend in Bullet 3.x. Last but not least, the open source Dynamica Bullet plugin for Maya is now deterministic and has preliminary support for soft body/cloth and convex decomposition through HACD.

For more info, see this forum post.

The C++ version of Bullet can be build using the Native Client compiler and it runs full-speed in the Google Chrome web browser, without plugin.  Just check your Chrome About Box to make sure the version is 15 or later and you can check out the live demo.

The Bullet C++ source code didn’t need any modification, and it compiled out-of-the-box using the premake4 generated Makefiles. Check out the Native Client for Dummies article for more information.

Bullet 2.79 is out. It is mainly a bugfix release, but there are a few new features. In particular there is a new convex decomposition library, HACD, integrated.  Also we now support the premake build system, next to cmake and autotools. Premake can autogenerated Visual Studio project files that can be distributed, unlike cmake.

See http://bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=7445 for more information.

We uploaded the slides from our SIGGRAPH course “Destruction and Dynamicsfor Film and Game Production”. You can find the slides at http://bulletphysics.org/siggraph2011

The new Cars 2 game by Disney Interactive is using Bullet physics!

Furthermore, Ralph shared the news that Riptide GP for Android is using Bullet:

“Besides our internal tech there are three key components that made Riptide GP possible:  The Android NDK, Bullet Physics, and FMOD Sound System.  The NDK allows us to write native C++ code which is then optimized for the ARM architecture.  Bullet Physics, which we use for collision detection and rigid body simulation, just worked out of the box.  FMOD Sound System released an Android version of their SDK just in time, which has been working flawlessly since the first release.”

See also http://www.vectorunit.com/blog/2011/6/27/the-tech-behind-riptide-gp.html

We are organizing a course on destruction and dynamics for game and film production for the SIGGRAPH 2011 conference in Vancouver. It will be held on Sunday August 7 from 2-5.15PM. Aside from this we released Bullet 2.78 a while ago. This release adds the option for contact generation between convex polyhedra using contact clipping and a fracture demo among others. Last but not least, AMD is looking for developers who want to help out with physics simulation, see the job description here.

Exocortex is pleased to announce that Momentum 2.0, the ultimate high speed multiphysics simulator, is now immediately available for Autodesk Softimage 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Exocortex Momentum 2.0, because it relies on the industrial strength Bullet physics framework, provides robust support for Rigid Bodies, Soft Bodies, Cloth, Ropes, Constraints, Interactions and Attachments.

Try or buy it today:

http://exocortex.com/simulation/momentum

The presentation is titled ‘game physics artifacts’ and covers similar material to chapter 2 of the Game Physics Pearls book. We will use both Bullet and the new Sony Physics Effects SDK to illustrate some examples. You can download the presentation for the Game Developers Conference Physics Tutorial and the preliminary Physics Effects-Bullet integration from http://code.google.com/p/bullet/downloads/list.

Also, you should check out the new Double Fine Studios Stacking game on XBox Live and PSN.

The latest Futuremark 3DMark 11 uses Bullet Physics in both CPU and GPU benchmarks using Microsoft DirectCompute. For more info see this whitepaper.

Check out this recent interview with FXGuide.com: Coumans recently started at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), having worked at Sony Computer Entertainment in R&D. “At AMD I will continue and expand the work I started at Sony on the open source Bullet physics library.”

The Postmortem on Hydro Thunder Hurricane on gamasutra.com mentioned the use of Bullet Physics for their game:

“I should mention also that we didn’t build everything ourselves: We used FMOD for audio, Bullet for collisions and rigid body physics, and the truly wonderful Subversion (specifically TortoiseSVN) for version control.”

Thanks to Colin Barrett for reporting this news.

We learned that Megamind, Shrek 4 and How to train your dragon are using Bullet physics for rigid body simulation. For Megamind, PDI build their own destruction system on top of the Bullet solver. Megamind is out in the cinemas on November 5th.

From the Maxon website, the latest Cinema 4D release 12 adds improved Bullet Dynamics support:

“Drop everything and let the laws of physics take over with the new rigid body dynamics in CINEMA 4D Studio. Based on the production-proven Bullet engine, the dynamic simulations are rock-solid stable and simple to use. Simulations can include thousands of objects and millions of polygons. Just add a tag to any object and let the forces of nature take over. Collisions can be detected for any shape – even concave surfaces. Hierarchies can be treated as a single object or individual dynamic bodies.

With just a click of the mouse, your hard bodies transform into soft and springy structures. Soft body simulations in CINEMA 4D Studio are simple to setup and offer amazing flexibility. You can easily adjust how soft and springy each object should behave, using vertex maps for point-level control.”

Download a demo version that supports all those features including .bullet export here: http://www.maxon.net/products/cinema-4d-studio/new.html
Watch some cool video tutorials here: http://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/2010/09/whats-new-in-cinema-4d-release-12/

On Monday July 25th, 2-5PM at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles we  discussed recent improvements in the Bullet collision detection pipeline in our SIGGRAPH course “Recent Advances in Real-Time Collision and Proximity Computations for Games and Simulations“. Thanks for all questions and feedback! See the slides here.

Disney Avalanche just shipped their Toy Story 3 game for PlayStation 3, XBox 360 and Wii, and it uses Bullet physics.

Weta Digital integrated Bullet in their in-house FX pipeline tool called wmRigid, and one of the first releases using the rigid body simulation is the A-Team movie, thanks to Ronnie for letting us know!