Book Image

Learning Physics Modeling with PhysX

By : Krishna Kumar
Book Image

Learning Physics Modeling with PhysX

By: Krishna Kumar

Overview of this book

<p>In this day and age, physics engines play a very critical role in the success of a sophisticated game. PhysX is a state-of-the-art cross-platform physics engine widely used by top game studios and developers. It contains all the physics-related components you will need and exploits the parallel-processing capability of modern GPUs as well as multi-core CPUs to make a game as physically-realistic as possible. This book will help you to program and simulate games by using PhysX 3.</p> <p>Learning Physics Modeling with PhysX helps you to master physics simulation using the PhysX Physics Engine from scratch. This is useful not only for game developers, but also for developers making virtual walkthroughs or training and other simulation applications. It will cover all the essential features of PhysX 3 with easy-to-understand code snippets and examples to help you learn quickly and efficiently.</p> <p>This book will start off by introducing you to the basic concepts of physic engines and will give you a glimpse of PhysX implementation. We then gradually cover more sophisticated topics with sample source code so that you can see what you have learned in action. We will cover the history and features of the PhysX SDK as well as how to configure it with the C++ compiler. After touching upon essential topics like rigid body dynamics and collision detection, we will gradually move on to more advanced topics like joints, scene queries, character controllers, particles, and cloth simulation. By the end of this book, you will have learned everything you need to know about the PhysX 3 Physics Engine, and you will be able to use it to program your very own physics simulation quickly and efficiently.</p>

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Learning Physics Modeling with PhysX
Krishna Kumar
Oct, 2013 | 104 pages
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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Physics Modeling with PhysX
Learning Physics Modeling with PhysX
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Starting with PhysX 3 SDK
Starting with PhysX 3 SDK
Brief history
PhysX features
Downloading PhysX SDK and tools
Configuring with VC++ Express 2010
Summary
2
Basic Concepts
Basic Concepts
Scene and Actors
Materials
Shapes
Creating the first PhysX 3 program
Simulating PhysX
Shutting down PhysX
Summary
3
Rigid Body Dynamics
Rigid Body Dynamics
Exploring a rigid body
Summary
4
Collision Detection
Collision Detection
Collision shapes
Trigger shapes
Simulation event
Filter shader
Broad-Phase collision detection
Narrow-Phase collision detection
Continuous collision detection
Summary
5
Joints
Joints
Joints in PhysX
Summary
6
Scene Queries
Scene Queries
Raycast queries
Sweep queries
Overlap queries
Summary
7
Character Controller
Character Controller
Character controller basics
Summary
8
Particles
Particles
Exploring particles
Creating a particle system
Particle system properties
Creating particles
Updating particles
Releasing particles
Particle drains
Collision filtering
Summary
9
Cloth
Cloth
Exploring a cloth
Creating a cloth fabric
Creating a cloth
Tweaking the cloth properties
Summary
10
PhysX Visual Debugger (PVD)
PhysX Visual Debugger (PVD)
PhysX Visual Debugger (PVD) basics
Connecting PVD using a network
Saving PVD data as a file
Connection flags
Summary
Index
Index

Brief history

PhysX SDK is a mature physics engine, which has been under development since 2004. It was developed by Ageia with the purchase of ETH Zurich spin-off NovodeX. Ageia was a fabless semiconductor company and the first company that developed a dedicated co-processor capable of performing physics calculations, which was much faster than the general purpose CPUs available at that time.

The intention of Ageia was to sell PPU (Physics Processing Unit) cards much like the dedicated GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) cards that we buy today. It developed the PhysX software SDK (formerly NovodeX SDK) to harness the processing power of a PPU. The company also licensed out the PhysX SDK as a physics middleware library for game production. Unfortunately, the PPU cards didn't sell very well commercially in the market. On February 4, 2008, Nvidia announced that it would acquire Ageia. On February 13, 2008, the merger was finalized. The PhysX engine is now known as Nvidia PhysX. The potential reason of Ageia acquisition by Nvidia was to implement PhysX on top of their CUDA architecture enabled GPU(s), for hardware-accelerated physics processing. The PhysX GPU acceleration is exclusive to Nvidia GPU(s), which gives Nvidia an edge over its competitors; that is, GPU manufacturers such as ATI/AMD.

PhysX SDK 3.3.0 is the latest release at the time of writing this book. PhysX 3.x features a new modular architecture and a completely rewritten PhysX engine. It provides a significant boost in overall performance as well as efficiency. It is a heavily-modified version written to support multiple platforms but has a single base code. Supported platforms include Windows; Linux; Mac OS X; game consoles such as XBOX 360 and PS3; and even Android-powered handheld devices. PhysX 3.3.0 added support for new platforms such as Xbox One, PS 4, Nintendo Wii U, Apple iOS, PS Vita, and Windows RT. PhysX SDK 3.x has undergone architecture and API improvement, and the code is cleaned at many levels to get rid of obsolete and legacy features and to integrate new physics capabilities.

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