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:
Phya is a C++ library, that was created as an expandable system for adding physical audio to a virtual world. Phya released as Open Source under the ZLib license.
Also included is a new demo for the Bullet dynamics engine.
+ Added split impulse support, penetration recovery won’t add momentum
+ cloth/soft body improvements: picking (pick and drag), tearing (click and release without mouse move), preliminary support for btSoftBody versus compound and concave trimesh
+ Added new btDbvtBroadphase, based on dynamic AABB tree. It has the capability to do view frustum culling and front-to-back traversal. See Extras\CDTestFramework for view frustum culling sample.
+ Enabled new btGjkEpa2 penetration depth solver, thanks to Nathanael
+ Provide access to all persistent manifolds for a given btBroadphasePair, see CharacterDemo for sample usage
+ Added linear and angular motor for btSliderConstraint
+ Add penetration depth test for convexSweepTest
+ removed several warnings for Windows build, thanks to Martijn Reuvers
+ Added Mac Cocoa Xcode project, thanks to TomorrowPlus
+ use collision margin of btBvhTriangleMeshShape for convexTest, Thanks to reltham for the contribution.
+ added custom memory allocator registration, thanks to Sly.
+ New BulletSoftBody library: cloth, rope and deformable volumes, including interaction with rigid bodies. Thanks Nathanael Presson.
+ Added btSliderConstraint
+ Added Extras/CdTestFrameWork, Thanks Pierre Terdiman
+ Added posix thread support (pthreads), Thanks Enrico.
+ Moved ConvexHull into Bullet/src
+ Moved optional quickstep and box-box collision detector to Bullet/src. Thanks Russell Smith for permission to re-distribute under the ZLib license.
+ Many bugfixes and improvements to BulletColladaConverter, btSubsimplexConvexCast, btMultiSapBroadphase, btOptimizedBvh
Wolfgang Engel developed the Oolong Engine 2 for iPhone, and initial Bullet support looks very promising. Unlike most other phones, the floating point performance of the iPhone is very good.
Add support for fast batch raycasting on SPU / BulletMultiThreaded
Add support for 16 and 32-bit indexed triangle meshes in SPU / BulletMultiThreaded version.
Improved COLLADA Physics export snapshot from any Bullet btDynamicsWorld. Saving the physics world into .dae (xml textfile) can be useful for debugging etc.
Initial version for Character Control Demo
Bugfixes in ConvexCast support against the world.
Added btCapsuleShapeX/Z
Added btTypedUserInfo, useful for serialization
Added Stan Melax Convex Hull utility library in Extras/ConvexHull. This is useful to render non-polyhedral convex objects, and to simplify convex polyhedra.
The SVN repository is sychronized with the existing sourceforge repository.
Development is ongoing, and outstanding issues will roll into upcoming releases.
Following link provides some physics related sessions during upcoming GDC. There will be some demos of Bullet physics at the showfloor. It is a nice occasion to meet up, so if you are around, please get in touch!
One of the distinguished projects at the Department of Computing at Imperial College London is about real-time physics simulation, using the Bullet physics library as case study.
