Autodesk and NVIDIA continue their effort to create the universal physics simulation system for 3ds Max package – it is known as MassFX.

What has changed in new MassFX version, that comes with 3ds Max 2013, in comparison to the first release? We have tried to answer this question in our review.

One of the main new features of MassFX 2013 is the addition of mCloth – cloth simulation module, which was co-developed with Autodesk. Despite the rumors, mCloth uses PhysX 2.8.4 cloth solver for underlying physical calculations.

In comparison to APEX Clothing tools in PhysX plug-ins, mCloth is clearly oriented on VFX area: “one click” set up (no need to skin the mesh and apply movement constraints, as for APEX), full collisions with MassFX rigid bodies with two-way interaction, vertex group operations (like pin or attach to object), support for dynamic and kinematic cloth, ability to bake the simulation in keyframes.

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If you are watching over PhysX SDK 3 development process, you may now that all-purpose cloth simulation engine, which can be found in SDK 2.x,  was replaced by new specialized PxCloth clothing solver in SDK 3.

Tech talk called “Character Clothing in PhysX 3“, presented by Tae-Yong Kim at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2011, provides in-depth overview of algorithms behind new clothing engine and its features.

Main features of new the solution are:

• Improved performance.
• Better artist control over bending and shearing of the cloth.
• Better handling of high-energy motion.
• Tapered capsules for better character representation.
• Other pleasing features like virtual particles (for increased collision resolution), CCD or particles mass scaling.

We are expecting PxCloth solver to become one of the major features of APEX Clothing 1.2 module, that is supposed to be released in upcoming months.

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It is now official – Borderlands 2 will be the next game to support GPU accelerated PhysX effects.

Update: GPU PhysX trailer was caught on camera

At GeForce Kepler Editor’s Day (event, during which Kepler GPUs were presented to press), Borderlands 2 demo featuring GPU PhysX effects was demonstrated by Randy Pitchford, Gearbox Founder and CEO, running on a GeForce GTX 680 GPU.

Hardware accelerated content will include:

• Fully simulated tearable cloth which interacts with weapons, forces, weather, etc
• Persistent GPU simulated particles that interact with the world
• Fully-interactive fluids
• Maybe something more

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QQ Dance 2 is a sequel to ultra-popular (over 2 million concurrent users, 100 million registered users) Chinese online dancing game called, obviously, QQ Dance.

Build on proprietary H3D engine, QQ Dance 2 will not only provide significant improvement in visual fidelity, but also feature fully simulated clothing and hair on characters using PhysX SDK 2.8.4 and APEX Clothing module.

Presented demo is containing 50 000 simultaneously simulated cloth vertices (for example, even most intense scene in Mafia 2 has no more than 15 000 cloth vertices).

QQ Dance 2 is supposed to be released in Q4 2012. This game will not only support GPU acceleration, but also have a CPU path for non-NVIDIA systems.

Batman: Arkham City tests the patience of PC gamers with several release delays, but will try to wheedle them with DX 11 Graphics and PhysX Technology.

Update: GPU PhysX in Batman: Arkham City - review and comparison video.

Recent comparison trailer gave us a glimpse of extra physics effects, and now we want to provide you with some additional details on what to expect from GPU PhysX content. In addition, new comparison PhysX video was released as well.

As usually, it will be possible to adjust level of in-game physics via “Hardware Accelerated PhysX” option in game’s launcher. There will be three settings:

PhysX Off: all GPU accelerated effects are disabled, only standart CPU physics (like ragdolls) is used.

PhysX Normal: enables additional particles effects (debris, volumetric smoke and steam, etc) and destructible environments.

PhysX High: includes all effects enabled withing “Normal” settings as well as realtime cloth and clothing simulation.

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Following previosly revealed roadmap, NVIDIA has updated 3.x generation of PhysX physics engine to version 3.1

List of publicly available free binary PhysX SDKs includes SDK for Windows PC, Linux, Mac OSX and, for the first time, Android platforms.

Update: PhysX SDK 3.1.1 is available for download

Update #2: PhysX SDK 3.2 Beta released

PhysX SDK 3.1 Release Notes:

General

• VC10 support has been introduced.
• VC8 support has been discontinued.
• Upgraded GPU tech to CUDA 4.
• Various improvements to Foundation and classes shared with APEX.
• Extensions, Character Controller and Vehicle source code made available in binary distribution.

• Namespaces cleaned up.
• Cleaned up a large number of warnings at C++ warning level 4, and set SDK to compile with warnings as errors.
• No longer passing NULL pointers to user allocator to deallocate.
• Added x86,x64 suffix to PxTaskCUDA.dll
• Removed boolean return value from PxScene::addActor(…), and similar API calls.

• Removed individual sample executables in favor of SampleAllInOne from PC and console builds.
• Fixed alpha blending in samples.
• Simplified some code in samples.
• Improved ambient lighting in samples.
• Made samples work with older graphics cards.
• Renamed some XBOX 360 specific files and folders.
• Improved and added more content the user’s guide.

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Another interesting research paper was published by Dr. Matthias Müller-Fischer, PhysX SDK Research Lead in NVIDIA.

Update: Oriented Particles solver through CUDA

It is called Adding Physics to Animated Characters with Oriented Particles and it further expands oriented particles approach with techniques for simulation of clothing on animated characters.

Abstract:

We present a method to enhance the realism of animated characters by adding physically based secondary motion to deformable parts such as cloth, skin or hair. To this end, we extend the oriented particles approach to incorporate animation information. In addition, we introduce techniques to increase the stability of the original method in order to make it suitable for the fast and sudden motions that typically occur in computer games. We also propose a method for the semi-automatic creation of particle representations from arbitrary visual meshes. This way, our technique allows us to simulate complex geometry such as hair, thick cloth with ornaments and multi-layered clothing, all interacting with each other and the animated character.

User monkeYB07 has posted a video tutorial, that covers APEX Clothing authoring process in Maya and further importing of completed clothing asset into Unreal Development Kit.

Update: New complete set of official APEX Clothing tutorials, including assets import and usage in UE3/UDK.

Basic result, working dynamic cloth, can be achieved in less than 10 minutes, but proper tweaking will certanly require more time.

For additional details on APEX Clothing authoring workflow you may refer to NVIDIA tutorials and APEX C page at Unreal Developer Network.

NVIDIA has has published a nice video, that is showcasing technical demo called “Glowball”, running on their next quad-core mobile chip known as “Project Kal-EL” or Tegra 3, presumably.

Glowball demo features some complex (for a mobile device) real-time dynamic lighting and shadowing effects, and decent level of PhysX based physics calculations – rigid body barrels and drapes, fully simulated as cloth obejcts.

Cloth simulation is partically interesting: scene contains 10 drapes, likely 100-150 vertices each, affected by gravity and board movement, calculated simultaneously – new kind of physics effects for mobile devices. This tech can be used not necessarily for flags or banners, but for dynamic clothing on characters, for example.

Demo was running on PhysX SDK 2.8.4.5.

Update: More physical demos on Tegra 3 platform

Mobile devices are interesting environment for PhysX SDK to evolve and adapt, so we are eager to see how things will play out in this direction.

Physical simulation of character clothing is yet inceptive, but very promising trend and a great way to make game characters more believable.

We are giving an overview of most interesting cloth simulation packages in our new article : “Clothing simulation solutions for games“.