NewtonPlayGround 1.53 (Updated on 22.10.2006)

Share with us how are you using the powerrrr of the force

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Postby Dave Gravel » Tue Apr 18, 2006 11:19 pm

Very nice work, amazing stuff.
Working very good on a ati x700 too.
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Postby DarthPhysics » Wed Apr 26, 2006 11:06 pm

Very nice !!
But i found just complicated to build anything :wink:
a little GUI like triview or like other 3D soft for build scenes , set join , material , define motor ... etc will be a very good addon .
Or if any GUI like that exist , please give me info on the url i can
get it :D

but you do a great work !!
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Postby Axyl » Thu May 04, 2006 1:15 am

Fantastic little application, though I've noticed two bugs that you might like to look into, both to do with loading a prior saved file that doesn't load everything as it should.

1) If I put in two boxes and join them with a slider, then adjust the motor property, it will push the boxes apart as expected. However, if I save and then load that file, then the slider joint will still be there, but adjusting the motor value will have no impact.

2) If I put a hinge joint between two boxes and set some limits on the joint, then those limits won't still be set if I load that from a saved file.

Cheers,
Axyl.
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Postby Sascha Willems » Fri May 12, 2006 6:03 am

Thanks for the feedback, I'll look into those bugs you mentioned and see what causes this.

I'll release an updated version of the NewtonPlayGround when the next version of Newtong goes public, which shouldn't be too far away.
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Postby Hatter » Mon May 29, 2006 6:09 am

Absolutely lovely application! I can't imagine a faster way of making joints and testing them.

I'm a complete noob to Newton, but I imported a custom wagon mesh and got the wheels working quite easily: http://www.dr-code.org/hatter/playground_wagon.zip
("wagon.3ds" should go in the "customdata/convexhulls" directory. "wood01_d.tga" into textures, "wagon.xml" in xml).

But right now the wagon isn't all that useful as a wagon since the main body is a convex hull. Do you think in a future release, you might add the functionality of linking physics primitives to arbitrary meshes (or bones)? That would make the application far more useful for artists. Then I could approximate the wagon with a few boxes and be able to put stuff into it.

If you add skinned ragdolls too, please consider linking the physics primitives to the skeleton, not the mesh. Then a game engine could have a single skeleton for animations with a single physics configuration, but with multiple meshes for different characters. Makes life easier for games with multiples character meshes.

But that's just a personal wishlist. :) It's a great programme already!
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Postby danharibo » Mon May 29, 2006 8:08 am

this shoud have its own forum section :)
if(bored==true)
self->sleep();
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Postby Sascha Willems » Tue May 30, 2006 6:46 am

It's already possible to have such a wagon working without it being a convex hull. Just import it as a compound collision, this way each part you've modelled in your 3D application get's its own convex hull and those parts are connected into a single compound collision. I just tried it with your model and it's exactly what you need.
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Postby Hatter » Tue May 30, 2006 9:41 am

Thanks for the reply. But I'm not sure I understood. If you have it working with stuff going into the wagon, could you please post the xml?

If I import the wagon as a convex hull, I get rigid wheels, right? And I still can't put anything inside the wagon because the top becomes solid. Basically, a convex hull does not really approximate the mesh closely enough for my purposes. Of course I could split the sides and carrying poles into separate meshes for a closer fit. Each part could be a convex hull and the wheels could be added separately with joints.

But I think it would be more elegant if I could approximate the wagon with a number of primitives: cylinders for the wheels and some boxes for the main body.

How about this? : I place the boxes and cylinders in the 3d application myself and name them, say, "collision_box" or "collision_cylinder", and then those would be collision primitives for the full mesh. That might even be possible already! Gotta go talk to the coders about that for the project I'm in. :)
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Postby Sascha Willems » Tue May 30, 2006 5:11 pm

Just save the wagon and the wheels as a separate file. Now import the wagon as a compound collision and import the wheels as convex hulls. Then just connect the wheels using joints to the compound for the wagon and now you can put stuff in it. See the help file for more info on how the compounds differ from convex hulls.
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Postby Hatter » Wed May 31, 2006 5:44 pm

Ok. I'm getting the hang of the program more and really like how meshes in 3ds files can be loaded individually. The coder on the project I'm working on has adopted your xml format for storing physics information.

I have a (maybe unrealistic) request. Last one, I promise. :) Would it be possible to have functions to make bounding boxes and spheres for meshes - in addition to convex hulls. I realize that Playground can make every sort of primitive already, but it is vastly easier to finetune their size and placement in a 3d content package while seeing the high-res mesh at the same time.

Alternatively, it would be lovely if Playground could recognize boxes, spheres, and cylinders in the .3ds file as primitives, but that is probably not realistic.
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Postby Sascha Willems » Wed May 31, 2006 6:50 pm

No, I don't think that this would be possible. The objects inside a 3DS are stored as meshes (via vertices and indices), and there is no way to identify it it's a box or a sphere or something else. The only way would be to get this out of the object's name, but then again that would make no sense since the name of an object should be used to indicate what it means rather than what shape it has. So this is a no and I can't implement that. But in the end I see no real reason for this, as this should (if needed) be done by your game/application where you can derive the primitive from the object's name.
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Postby Sascha Willems » Tue Jul 11, 2006 2:47 pm

Ah well, after a (bigger) break from coding I just started to put finishing touches on the next release. Almost finished, but I still need to reproduce some bugs reported and then (if they're bugs) fix them, but other than that release 1.53 is finished. I also have experimental support for skinned ragdolls (milkshape-models) in, but since it's only working on a very few models (which I guess depends on how their bones are setup, some of them have dozens of bones which are not really suited for physics) I don't think that I'll include it in 1.53 but maybe at some later point.

And since I don't want to leave you with "nothing" in your hands, I decided to share a scene some user (thanks Martin Schnuch, who was also one of the very very few persons that gave me some really good feedback on NPG via E-Mail) created that looked very interesting to me. It's visually not stunning, but it's a bicycle that rolls down on a terrain whitout falling on it's side and without the help of an up-vector and such. Though nothing spectacular this again surprised me on how realistic Newton does it's job. So if you wanna see it yourself, get the XML for that scene here.
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Postby Julio Jerez » Wed Jul 12, 2006 12:50 am

Wow and that bicycle roll just like that?
That comes as pleasant surprise,
Maybe it rolls because the wheels inertia is a little higher than it really is in real life. :wink:
If that is that case then a low spin generate a restoring torque enought to keep the vehicle upright. It is like those toy motorcycles with the winding wheel very heavy compare to the toy.

You can see at the very beginning when the bicycle tumble and some how recover itself, very cool :)
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Postby Sascha Willems » Tue Oct 03, 2006 2:50 pm

Long time no update, but due to personal reasons I haven't had much time for coding over the last few months, but the situation has relaxed a bit. So today I sat down and finished implementing skinned ragdolls. Except for some minor things (no shadows, not all properties can be set) they're down and you can put them into your scenes, drag them around and even attach springs to them.

And to show them in action I also made a small video which you can download here (~4 MBytes, WMV format).

Besides this I also fixed some bugs and things that were still open, so I hope to now finally have the new version done this or the next weekend.
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Postby Sascha Willems » Wed Oct 04, 2006 8:29 am

And here is another video which I just call "Walaber's trampoline for poor people. It shows the skinned ragdoll together with some cheap attempt at a very primitive form of a trampoline.
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