Scythe Visual Physics Editor

[spacejim]

http://www.physicseditor.com

I've finally got to a presentable stage of my physics editor "Scythe". It basically allows artists to assemble physical entities like vehicles, ragdolls, structures, rather than the programmers generating them programatically, which is just stupid.

I've been working hard on it for about a year, and there is still a lot I want to do with it.
Its made with Ogre, and uses Newton for the preview simulations. The idea though is that it stores to an independant physics file format which can by loaded by anyone, so its not limited to any particular rendering or physics engine.

I would be interested in any feedback, and also I am interested to know what model formats people would like added.

Its free for non-commercial use:

http://www.physicseditor.com/download/Scythe_1-08.msi

There is also some basic tutorials here:
http://www.physicseditor.com/support.shtml

A cool wobbly windmill, every piece and bar is separately attached and breakable, and the blades spin under motor power.



The windmill loaded into a game in Ogre:


A vehicle, with a cool spinning siren. Every piece and panel is separate and attached by breakable joints.

--In edit mode:

--In simulation mode:

[Phantom]

It looks awesome!!
I haven't checked it out yet, but I will

keep up the excellent work chief

cheers,
Paul.

[zeno60]

Fantabmaglorious, that's all I can utter.

[kallaspriit]

Very interesting, the first couple of things I noticed were that UNDO (CTRL-Z) would be a nice option and in simulation mode a pick tool (like in every newton tutorial) would be good too. Also the camera movement is not so logical and kind of bumpy, maby you should learn from some other great modelling tools like 3ds max What I was also missing was some kind of "select behind" tool or atleast a list of objects to choose from because when I created a ball, it spawned in the windmill and I wal only able to select the windmill object until I had to move it. You could combine the list with an option to hide objects or disable them from selecting. Still raw but I'm sure its going to be a great tool once finished so keep up the good work

[spacejim]

Thanks for the advice! Undo and picking I will add as soon as I can. There is already a Freeze option, if you go to the "edit" tab on the right, there's 2 buttons, "freeze selected" and "un-freeze all".
As for the camera control I prefer it to max, because I find it more efficient. As you point out though, I will try and make the motion smoother.

[The unProfessional]

I'm very interested in using this in my project. It's a lot more legitimate than my current method

Do you plan on adding support for convex hull primitives anytime soon?

[spacejim]

Do you plan on adding support for convex hull primitives anytime soon?

Actually I was doing that today. It will be in the next update in a day or two.

[The unProfessional]

Excellent Any other nifty features on the horizon? (for the pro version)

[spacejim]

Take a look at the buy page, it shows the planned major features. I was thinking of doing the arraying/chaining tools next, so you can generate things like rope bridges and tank tracks. Do you have any preference?

EDIT: Oh yeah, and convex sub-divisioning. So you basically have a model, press a button, and it generates a compound collision out of convex hulls to fit it perfectly. I'm excited about that one

[The unProfessional]

No specific preferences from me... it looks like you're on the right track!

If I could make a suggestion though, it'd be to put off adding support for additional physics engines in favor of more editor features. The specific physics engine has little to do with your editor since the format can be read and fed into any engine.

Convex subdivisioning is a great idea. It'd be especially cool if it has an "accuracy" parameter that determines how exact the subdivisioning gets, since it's not always necessary to have an exact representation, but the feature could save people a lot of time.

This is the best physics editor I've seen since Havok's maya tools.

[buhatkj]

when i open up the windmill demo scene in scythe, after it hits the ground it like freaks out and goes flying off into space...
What's up with that? if i just start from a blank scene, and add a few primitive like boxes and spheres and capsules and stuff, they all fall normally, bounce nicely and react realistically. what's up with the windmill, does it do this for anyone else?

[spacejim]

Ahh you are right! Thankyou for pointing it out, it must be some recent change I made to the newton plugin, I will fix it soon, if you want to try out the windmill in the meantime, you can use version 1.04 from my first post.

EDIT: I fixed it!