Ragdoll and other physically based interactions
by Xander Twombly · in General Discussion · 05/03/2005 (10:06 am) · 5 replies
Hi folks,
I've just joined in with the Torque 2D fun, and will be getting the full Torque game engine shortly. My primary purpose is going to be in game development with my son, but I also have a more serious research area that I'd like to see if I can fit into the Torque engine, and if anybody else has much experience. I work for NASA in a variety of computer science/engineering areas, and one project we have been pursuing for a couple of years is the design of autonomous robot balance controllers based on the design of the vertebrate nervous system. To test these controller designs, we have had to build a simulation environment with highly realistic physically based interactions between rigid body objects - i.e., walking robots and their environments. The skeletel structures, joint activities, physical properties (mass, inertia, torques, frictions, etc.) all had to be well represented, and the collision detection had to be very accurate (that was one of the killers in terms of resource usage).
I would like to see if we could implement our physical interaction methods into Torque, and extend some of them with some of the GPU bump-collision shaders I have been experimenting with for increased accuracy and speed, but have a limited amount of time to spend on this right now. If anybody else is working on implementing a more robust physics engine and high accuracy collisions, I'd like to get together with you and see if we might combine efforts.
Anybody interested?
Cheers,
Xander
I've just joined in with the Torque 2D fun, and will be getting the full Torque game engine shortly. My primary purpose is going to be in game development with my son, but I also have a more serious research area that I'd like to see if I can fit into the Torque engine, and if anybody else has much experience. I work for NASA in a variety of computer science/engineering areas, and one project we have been pursuing for a couple of years is the design of autonomous robot balance controllers based on the design of the vertebrate nervous system. To test these controller designs, we have had to build a simulation environment with highly realistic physically based interactions between rigid body objects - i.e., walking robots and their environments. The skeletel structures, joint activities, physical properties (mass, inertia, torques, frictions, etc.) all had to be well represented, and the collision detection had to be very accurate (that was one of the killers in terms of resource usage).
I would like to see if we could implement our physical interaction methods into Torque, and extend some of them with some of the GPU bump-collision shaders I have been experimenting with for increased accuracy and speed, but have a limited amount of time to spend on this right now. If anybody else is working on implementing a more robust physics engine and high accuracy collisions, I'd like to get together with you and see if we might combine efforts.
Anybody interested?
Cheers,
Xander
#2
05/03/2005 (10:02 pm)
Yeah, do it in 3D with TGE!
#4
One area that I have just begun to experiment with is using a bumpmap type definition of a surface to calculate high-precision collisions, relying on the environmental mapping features to capture where incoming surfaces would collide ("reflect") of of the target bumpmap. The hope is that we can implement a sufficiently high precision interaction that highly detailed geometry can be used without the overhead of a large number of polys. A simple target application is the interaction of a rubber tipped "foot" on one of our robots and how it is partially driven into soft soil and sand while walking up a steep terrain. Further development would be along the lines of realistic friction as defined by the bumpmap surfaces that are moving across one another, and also particle ("wind and blown sand") that could press against a detailed structure and effect its movements.
Once I get up to speed with TGE I'll introduce some of these ideas via the ODE framework and see if any of you other geniuses can run with it. I think there is a lot of potential for tapping the GPU for collision physics and would like to get other peoples takes.
On another note, I did just download the Novodex Physics SDK from Novodex (now owned by Ageia), and that is a very comprehensive physics engine. They are releasing it free to developers for personal / non-commercial use and research, and it will be free for commercial games as long as your physics supports the Physics Processing Unit PPU called PhysX that is being brought to market by Ageia. This chip will sit on the PCI express bus and is said to handle upwards of 100x as many objects and collisions as todays software approaches. I know that Epic has licensed the engine for use in Unreal 3, so that says something. Boards are expected to be available in the fall, so hopefully some sample boards will be avialable to us early developers sometime over the summer. I'll be investigating the use of this physics engine as well, and if it looks good I'll create a binding system to integrate it into TGE for all to share.
I suspect that once we get our walking robots into the torque engine, that this community will have a lot to say about how an autonomous vehicle can survive as it travels around the virtual world doing science experiments. I look forward to interacting with all of you.
Ciao,
Xander
05/04/2005 (12:03 am)
ODE just may be the ticket - glad to see that someone is already working on integrating it into the torque engine. We used ODE for some of the robot physics, but the level of detail we required tended to bring the simulation out of real-time interaction.One area that I have just begun to experiment with is using a bumpmap type definition of a surface to calculate high-precision collisions, relying on the environmental mapping features to capture where incoming surfaces would collide ("reflect") of of the target bumpmap. The hope is that we can implement a sufficiently high precision interaction that highly detailed geometry can be used without the overhead of a large number of polys. A simple target application is the interaction of a rubber tipped "foot" on one of our robots and how it is partially driven into soft soil and sand while walking up a steep terrain. Further development would be along the lines of realistic friction as defined by the bumpmap surfaces that are moving across one another, and also particle ("wind and blown sand") that could press against a detailed structure and effect its movements.
Once I get up to speed with TGE I'll introduce some of these ideas via the ODE framework and see if any of you other geniuses can run with it. I think there is a lot of potential for tapping the GPU for collision physics and would like to get other peoples takes.
On another note, I did just download the Novodex Physics SDK from Novodex (now owned by Ageia), and that is a very comprehensive physics engine. They are releasing it free to developers for personal / non-commercial use and research, and it will be free for commercial games as long as your physics supports the Physics Processing Unit PPU called PhysX that is being brought to market by Ageia. This chip will sit on the PCI express bus and is said to handle upwards of 100x as many objects and collisions as todays software approaches. I know that Epic has licensed the engine for use in Unreal 3, so that says something. Boards are expected to be available in the fall, so hopefully some sample boards will be avialable to us early developers sometime over the summer. I'll be investigating the use of this physics engine as well, and if it looks good I'll create a binding system to integrate it into TGE for all to share.
I suspect that once we get our walking robots into the torque engine, that this community will have a lot to say about how an autonomous vehicle can survive as it travels around the virtual world doing science experiments. I look forward to interacting with all of you.
Ciao,
Xander
#5
05/04/2005 (12:25 am)
Wow, I didn't know that physics cards were coming out so soon! Will they be PCI Express only? Hardware physics will be nuts. Half-Life 2 is quite impressive with it's physics already. 
Torque Owner Kirk Haynes