Monday, May 23, 2011

Blender 2.5 Realtime Physics


Following the latest developments of Blender, it's almost impossible to keep up at pace if you slack off and wait for the official ones to bloom. Recently, we've been informed and blown away by Blender Cycles (Blender 2.5's realtime rendering engine). If you haven't been updated yet, check these links:

http://www.blendernation.com/stream/tag/blender-cycles/

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/Render/Cycles

http://www.blendernation.com/2011/05/02/cycles-render-demo-by-mike-pan/

OK, that's just the introduction. My coder/developer friend Goatman has recently written an addon for Blender to test the new object-oriented ctypes ODE wrappers and the results were mind-blowing! In a nutshell, you'll be experiencing realtime physics inside of Blender's Python API and interface without having to exit the default interface and activate game engine to achieve such.

Briefly on the list of features to add are the following:
- Kinect interface support
- ragdoll rigging support
- gamepad support
- Wiimote support

Quoted from Goatman: "the goal is digital puppetry and game engine export"

And for a proof of concept:





For more info and for the download links, check out his blog post here http://pyppet.blogspot.com/2011/05/ode-ctypes-in-blender.html


-Reyn

5 comments:

kike sanz said...

will softbody be supported?
will i be able to drive car using Vehicle Wrapper?

raptor said...

Hi Kike Sanz,

I plan to support all the features of ODE, so yes soft-body will be supported at some point.

Currently there is no interface for creating something like a car that is driven with controls. However that is one of my goals. At this point your only option is to jump into the source code, which is light, < 1000 lines of code, and implement a drive-the-car test.

snot_nose said...

looks cool!
I was wondering if there is some way to implement also a game AI into this Realtime Physics?
I'm currently working on a crowd system using blender's GE. one of my main problems is that i can record the main-collision-box movement, but i cannot record the animation clips of the armatures controlled by these collision boxes. maybe if it's possible to implement also the AI inside i could record the whole simulation with the character animation - realtime.

raptor said...

hi snot_nose,
I am also thinking about implementing AI. My guess is that it would be easier to do it with this addon rather than the BGE; because with this addon you have all the code within the control of Python and you may tune its workings however you need quickly, without any recompiling or messing with blender's internal source code.

extro24 said...

I can't tick the Active Physics tab in the Blender User preferences. All the others can be ticked and activated. This is under Ubuntu 10.4 with Blender 2.57b.

libode-dev is installed (with apt-get). Dunno what is wrong.