NewtonPlayGround

[Julio Jerez]

Dark Master Sascha you did all that and you don't even have a PHD.
Silence my friend you are embarrassing robotics community.

[Aphex]

Interesting... maybe make the feet longer?
Walking is far from a trivial exercise (pun intended)

[Julio Jerez]

Somehow the humanoid walker remind me a tyrannosaurus red, maybe you can put
the Scavenger / Predator TRed controversy.

Maybe you can add a Torso, joint designed to help of the balance.
I will be easy, just walk down all the bodies calculating the, volume and position of the center of mass.
Then you can calculate the center of mass of the whole set of articulated bodies.

Second you keep track of the contact of the feet with the ground,
With the position of all the contacts you can calculate the center of all contacts. And project the result over he floor.

Now you have two points the center of mass of the walker, and the center of contacts.
Project the tow point over the floors,

Using the center of contacts as the center of a circle, you can measure the distance from the projected center of mass to the projected center of contacts; the error is the measure use in the call back of the “Balance Joint”, to push the torso to aligned with the center of contacts.

I can see the if it work the body will maintain equilibrium automatically, and it will even sway form side to side as the center of contact shift form left to right.

This was just and Ideas that pop to mind, I think I could work. And there is not need for Neutral Net or any Genetic algorithm.

Hey you may even find out the dinosaurs did have to have the tail extended to the back fo the equilibrium and for maneuvering

[Julio Jerez]

Actually you can make a simplification, If you make the torso say 3 to 5 time heavier that the legs, the effect of the leg in the calculation of the center of mass is negligible, so you only need to consider the position of the upper torso on the calculation of the correction error for the equilibrium position

[Sascha Willems]

So as some of you may have noticed, Julio has started overhauling the vehicle container and already posted a preview of it some days ago. And recently we SDK developers also got an updated SDK to play around with. Though the vehicle container still has some bugs and isn't fully finished, it turned out totally awesome. Gone are the days of hour long tweaking it to get e.g. a vehicle with a stiff suspension.

And one of the things I tried with the old container version, but never worked, was a truck with a big trailer. So I just remembered about me wanting to try that and so I did with the beta of the new SDK with the new vehicle container and well, it works :

(clicky)


As you can see there is a truck with a big trailer, and the two are connected with a ball-and-socket joint. It drives around nice but could use some tweaking (it was just a quick test). To show what the new vehicle container can do, I also included a race car with a stiff (note : even totally stiff suspensions work, even stiffier than the one on that car) suspension in the scene.

And to get a "picture" of how those vehicles now drive, you can grab a video of the two vehicles driving around here (4.2 MByes, WMV format).

[Julio Jerez]

Ohhhh that is just beautiful, I love the big rig

[zenoid]

like the truck !!! I'll enjoy the new sdk to implement all the fonctionnalities of forest vehicles (some with double chassis and four bridges) and trial trucks. Very nice.

do the truck have rigid axle simulated ?

[Julio Jerez]

No right now, but we are working on it. The final version will have the option for adding axles to the vehicle joint.

[MikeR]

People are sure glad I don't drive my truck like that.
That was a very cool video.

[Assembler]

The truck looks like the one from daimler-chrysler

[Sascha Willems]

Next stop on my way to worldomination : Springs

See a video of them in action here (1.75 MBytes, WMV).

Right now it's just a very basic implementation and the springs only have different tightness and damping. But I also may (depends on my time) add limited springs.

And you btw. can see the new CEL-shader in that video I just recently implemented into the NewtonPlayGround. You can read more on that on my blog (see sig).

P.S. : Being a total physics novice, I found this article about springs very helpful.

[Assembler]

seems to be very good!

[Julio Jerez]

Are you going to take the world hostage and ask for onnnne millliionnn dollarrrrr ransom?

[Sascha Willems]

No update for a long time here, eh? But much has happened behind and also in front of the scenes, and since it shouldn't be too long until release is due (should be short after the bugfixed version of NGD 1.5 is released), I decided to give some update.

So here are some new screenshots. They are all in 1280x960 in size and over 100k big, so beware when you're on a slow connection. Just click on a thumb to see the bigger version :



And here are the descriptions, in case you're still interested (from left to right) :
Shot 1 : This is the most recent scene, and I just finished it some minutes ago. It's a model of our solar system and all the planets are connected to disks that are connected with each other using the new custom gear joint. This means that when you rotate a disc, all planets will rotate according to the gear ratio that was set up. Looks fun and also is fun.
Shot 2 : You already saw the catapults, and this is just the graphically spiced-up version of that scene. The environment is loaded from an .X-file for which I wrote an importer to use Direct3D .X-files with OpenGL. And instead of simple spheres, the catapults now throw some real stones which make for a much more interesting flight-path.
Shot 3: New scene to demonstrate all the joint types included with Newton/Playground. Nothing too different from the scene that was in the old PlayGround, but this one shows how many joints Newton actually has (no Upvector in there!), though you could do all the joints you ever need with the custom joint interface.
Shot 4: Convex-hull madness at it's best. This is a bowl full of famous teapots that are maed up using convex hulls. Though it get's slow at times, framerates still are not too bad for Newton (and rendering also takes it's time, especially with shadows enabled).
Shot 5: As already posted on my blog, one of the new Features is a character controller included in the PlayGround, and that house is the scene to show it off. Using it is simple : Just open up the dialog and set up the size, forces and position of the character controller and off you go. Oh, and you can also grab stuff like in the ego-mode, just think of HL².


So much for this media-update, hope you like it. There have been many other additions/changes and dozens of bug-fixes that were done in the last weeks, which actually can't be shown in any screenshots. And to accomodate with the naming of the new NGD-release, the PlayGround will also be called NewtonPlayGround 1.5 instead of just 1.3!

[Julio Jerez]

So you got planet and whole model of the solar system, you know if you did that 500 years in the past you would be burned alive. How would Copernicus like the have a model like that?
Here the question I am curios about, afraid to ask, is the bowl dynamic of a static model?