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>
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Learning Physics Modeling with PhysX
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Joints in PhysX


Joints in PhysX are constraints that set the properties of two interconnected actors and their interaction with each other. Joints can be used in many ways in physics simulation, for example, making a ragdoll using joints for a game character, connecting doors and windows with a hinge joint, and creating chains or ropes by connecting a series of joints. Joints are always created between two actors, out of which at least one must be movable. This means that it should be either of type PxRigidDynamic or PxArticulationLink, and the other actor of that joint may be any of those as well as PxRigidStatic. The PxArticulationLink class is used for creating articulated joints and currently is in the experimental stage. Articulated joints are specifically used for creating joints of actuated characters. The PxRigidStatic class is used for creating static actors having spatial volume, but they remain fixed in the PhysX scene. Static actors can be used as a fixed support in world space...