While hopping between projects the idea of a particle-based approach to rigid-body kinematics soon became my white whale, obsession ensued and I quickly began filling enough notebooks to fill a John Doe apartment. While the mechanics of rigid-bodies can be fairly simply described and implemented with linear and angular properties, my goal with ‘fuzzy physics’ has been to at least test out the possibilities of a different approach to physics-based movement, one a little more accessible to someone that is programmer by trade but animator by craft (in other words, can’t do a Jacobi rotation to save his life)

While in the midst of the some new rigid-body physics experiments (a continuation from my previous post on Jakobsen-style position based dynamics: (http://labs.byhook.com/2010/02/11/fuzzy-physics-3-1-rigid-body-dynamics-pt-1/) , the hooplah around the iPad and Apple getting all ‘The Hills’ on Adobe provided a welcome excuse for trying something with a completely different perspective. With the tech world’s lips aflutter and teeth agnashing about HTML5 and it’s impact on the web, we decided to use a couple days between projects to dig in and see how we could translate our Flash awesomeness to something a little more worthy of having a lower case i before it.

While position-based dynamics can quickly create cool IK and rope effects due to its particle/constraint structure, it is often mentioned solely in the context of cloth and soft-body simulation while rigid body dynamics are only hinted at, and for good reason.  Most behaviors of position-based systems are emergent and make much of the work feel [...]

In my last post I went over basic velocity-less integration and constraint systems to create some simple and easy inverse kinematic dynamics.  Before moving on to more complicated fair like rigid bodies and particle systems from that groundwork, I wanted to try and apply those basic principles to something a little more tangible.  After all, [...]

If you’ve ever worked on any client projects requiring ‘realistic’ or ‘real-world’ physics, you’ve probably found that their idea of realistic differs wildly from the physics resultant from the Big Bang.  Likewise with games, its often enough and even better to convey the feel of physics rather than running a precise simulation.  After all, you [...]