Archive for July, 2013
SIGGRAPH 2013: Latest improvements to Position Based Fluids
Our readers may remember Position Based Fluids – new and promising fluid simulation approach, which has got quite a bit of attention few months ago.
Miles Macklin, one of the authors of the PB Fluids method, has presented latest improvements to the algorithm at SIGGRAPH 2013 conference – namely, two-way interaction with rigid bodies and cloth objects, as showcased in the videos below.
* Two-Way Coupling with Rigid Bodies
The Bureau: XCOM Declassified to have advanced Cloth and Particle PhysX effects
Recent IGN Commentary video has revealed that PC version of “The Bureau: XCOM Declassified“, third-person shooter with tactical elements from 2K Games, will feature, among other improvements, the support for GPU accelerated PhysX effects.
Update: GPU PhysX effects trailer
As one can notice (at 1:30), the Advanced Graphics options menu of The Bureau includes “PhysX Particles” and “PhysX Cloth” settings, that can be switched On and Off separately.
According to information we have recieved so far, The Bureau: XCOM Declassified will be based on PhysX SDK 2.8.4 and Unreal Engine 3, and will feature not only particle (mesh debris) and cloth effects, but also use APEX Turbulence module.
PhysX SDK 3.3 Beta is available for public
NVIDIA has released PhysX SDK 3.3 Beta 2 – first public Beta release of the new major version of the PhysX SDK 3.x
Update: PhysX SDK 3.3.0: Final Release
PhysX SDK 3.3 introduces a broad set of the new features and also presents a vast performance improvement.
Please refer for SDK 3.3 Beta Preview for the detailed description of some of the features, and for “The Evolution of the PhysX SDK” article for the performance data.
| PhysX SDK 3.3 Beta 2 – Release Notes |
RELEASE HIGHLIGHTS
- Added PhysXDevice/64.dll to the PC packages. See Windows readme for more details.
- Added support for the NVIDIA Kepler GPU architecture.
- Added support for the Nintendo Wii U console.
- Added support for Windows 8 Modern UI applications (ARM and x86).
- Ported our SIMD library to the ARM NEON architecture.
- Multi Box Pruning (MBP) is offered as an alternative broad phase algorithm to Sweep And Prune (SAP). MBP shows improved performance when all objects are moving or when inserting large numbers of objects. Its generic performance might be inferior to SAP when many objects are sleeping.
- Significant performance and stability optimizations for rigid body solver.
- New function to compute the minimum translational distance and direction to separate two overlapping geometry objects.
- Improved Persisten Contact Manifold (PCM) contact generation mode is now often faster and more robust than the still available legacy path.
- Improved performance of scene queries and contact reports.
- Improved behavior and performance of Continuous Collision Detection (CCD).
- Reduced memory footprint of rigid body classes.
- Added support for sharing shapes among rigid bodies.
- Significantly improved cloth behavior and GPU performance.
- Added support for cloth colliding against itself, other cloth instances, and scene geometry.
- Improved useability of binary and xml serialization.
- Memory can be saved for objects that do not participate in the simulation and are used for scene queries only. For details see the new flag PxActorFlag::eDISABLE_SIMULATION.
Full PhysX SDK 3.3 Beta 2 Release Notes can be viewed here.