Back in 2008, I wrote some software for fun to generate various optimized walking mechanisms. And when I also picked up some electronics and wood working skills in more recent years, I was able to turn one of these mechanisms into an actual wireless walking wooden coffee table: the Carpentopod. This post briefly covers this project from start to end.
Armed Mine is a creature I created for Doom 3 that uses procedural animation to drive motor-controlled physics joints. Animation-driven physics gives a lot of flexibility, but can be difficult to get right. Especially when the engine doesn’t support this out of the box. Read how the Doom 3 physics engine was extended and the Armed Mine was implemented.
Find out how the horse’s tail physics simulation for W!Games’ game ‘My Horse & Me’ was developed from prototype to final product, going from a many-strand technique to a more optimized skin-and-bone skeletal animation system.
CamBall is a virtual ball simulation that uses a cheap webcam, simple 2D physics, the OpenCV library and some creativity to augment a webcam’s images with a virtual ball you can grab and throw around in real-time. Read about the used computer vision and physics techniques, see the video, or simply try it out yourself!
One way to simulate physics constraints and collisions is to use springs. It might not be the most stable solution for all applications, but it can be stable and fast enough for a lot of them. Like my (abstract looking) quad vehicle, for example, of which its traction and skidding behaviour are implicit consequences of the simulated springs in the soft-body tires.