Disney's Dynamica plugin for Bullet Physics

#1

Gotta love free physics engines & Maya plugins! :smiley:

Walt Disney Studios has released their in-house Dynamica Maya plugin (with source code) for the open source Bullet physics engine.

“Dynamica allows to perform rigid body simulations inside Maya, using different underlying libraries. Right now only Bullet Physics is supported, but in the future other library will be added, such as NVidia PhysX. It will be possible to switch between libraries on the fly. This will be useful for example when some parts of the simulation are particularly critical, requiring the need for a more precise (but slower library). It will still be possible to use a less precise (but faster) library in the non-critical part of the simulation.”

Find it at Bullet Physics…

BTW, Bullet is currently looking into CUDA GPU and OpenCL acceleration as well.

Update: I wrote a few utility scripts, you can find RBDTools in the Bullet Forums to help you bake / render Dynamica rigid bodies (and a couple of other tools).

To see some quick test animations I did with Dynamica: See my Channel on Youtube and my old Google video feed.

#2

safe! cheers sphere.

any good??

#3

meh…need a new mac.

#4

Oh man you made my morning! I always thought someone should bring bullet to maya. It’s free, its open source, and it is exponentially better than maya’s built in rigid bodies (not an exaggeration).

#5

let me ask
still no x64? :slight_smile: (maya 2008x64)
i read that can be compile for x64 but i couldn’t find download link if there is any at all :slight_smile:
so i am blind or what ? :slight_smile:

#6

ill try to recompile it later today…

#7

I did a quick de rigueur brick test late last night. :stuck_out_tongue: :rolleyes:
(unfortunately Google’s recompression / downsampling muddied it up.)
My first test using Bullet Physics for Maya

First thing is that Dynamica, right now, is doing a rotation/repositioning to mesh/hull objects when they are turned into rigid bodies; so I haven’t been able to test shatters and such. Hopefully that gets fixed real soon! But Bullet is quite fast, perhaps not as fast as PhysX, however I noticed that cube stacking is very solid, don’t need to settle stacks, so that is cool; and it appears mesh object don’t need to be convex like PhysX, nice. Dynamica is clean and simple, which appeals to me; it’s a little limited at this point, but it has great potential. Can’t get enough of physics tools. :smiley:

#8

Is there any chance to get this plugin for maya 8.5 - windows 32 bit? If so, please give me the link.

Thanks in advance

#9

Walt Disney Studios has released their in-house Dynamica Maya plugin

Disney!!>??? releasing something free to the public?!! W…T…F

Beware. :slight_smile:

#10

Yeah, the unlicensed version replaces all your RBs with mickey heads.

#11

We just build a Mac OS Intel/x86 build of this Dynamica plugin, can someone check it out?

There is no installer, just unpack, open a terminal and execute
./install.sh

Are there any volunteers to build the plugin for Win64? If so, please reply at
http://www.bulletphysics.com/Bullet/phpBB3/viewforum.php?f=12

Here is a screenshot of the Mac build:

#12

ooh, very fancy.

#13

Well this is fun, Dynamica is new and actively being developped, very promising indeed.

I’m really surprised at how well Bullet physics handles stacking. I tried a little stress test with a few thousand rigid bodies and right off the bat they didn’t move and were rock solid, impressive. I was rolling spheres at the structure and taking out some of it’s pillars but it kept standing, so I had to lob a big heavy sphere at it to take it down :slight_smile: : Bullet Physics Pyramid Destruction with Dynamica for Maya plugin.

#14

@erwincoumans

i would like to help and recompile it for x64 i have dl the source but im missing some files…

#15

aughhh i had to make a stack fo 20,000 phones, using maya dynamics. i got it to work but it required a lot of creativity. this is exactly what i needed. well, next time :slight_smile:

#16

Sphere♥ i love to watch your simulation!, can’t wait to try it :slight_smile: x64? :slight_smile:

#17

plugin for maya 2008 x64 is ready :slight_smile:

let me test it a little and ill post it…

cheers

#18

great bazuka! you are the Man! :slight_smile: can’t wait :slight_smile:

cheers!

#19

awesome, thanks Bazuka…looking forward to trying it out! :slight_smile:

#20

Hi everyone, I’m the software manager at Walt Disney Animation Studios who kicked off this project and cleared the open source release, and the developer was the excellent Nicola Candussi in my group. This is a somewhat duplicate post to a post I made on the bullet physics forums.

Our release of this project is purely based on open source philosophies. Our interest in releasing this open source is that we don’t have enough resources at our studio to take it through all the roadmap items that there is potential for within the bullet engine. Internal development will only be driven by our artist needs/requests, but we intend to keep an eye on forum posts like this to extract any ideas that may be beneficial. We’ll certainly roll any enhancements back into the community. But, we hope that other independent developers and studios who are excited by the potential will also contribute code back so that it’s a truly collaborative development project (and we’ll definitely take advantage :thumbsup:).

Please continue to contribute ideas for a desired roadmap on these forums, as well as cool results like those above.

Thanks!
Arthur