I was experimenting those days with the Nvidia latest implementation of Physx and a big “!” popped into my mind…
Unity’s implementation of Physx is not hardware accellerated, right? The current version is GPU accellerated, allowing for leveraging the cpu in calculation intensive tasks like fluid, cloth, etc deformations by passing those to the GPU…(Note: BUT it is only supported by Nvidia’s cards… this means that if i play a game based on physx with an ATI card i don’t get hardware accelleration, right?).
So… was just wondering… since you said that you are interested in implementing the latest version of physx into Unity when a retrocompatible version will be released… will we get something hardware accellerated? will the ati side of the world remain ignored?
Random thing: from what I have seen, Nvidia’s Physx does not work on Mac… this means that you have made a porting on yourself, or i am ust totally wrong?
Random Thing #2: was looking at the latest “add ins” to torque3d… i must say that i am impressed how it is becoming something really similar to Unity… this is really interesting as I think that will cause some competition (great thign for us users!) … anyway… i think that some of that are just plain stupid things … (wet shader… just a tiling bumpmap… ) but some harder-to-implement things like depth of field is really interesting!
Random Thing #3: I want destructable objects! [sorry for the childish thing… but a nice concept just came to my head]
Hi Philip, just a thing from another Italian Unity user on the 3rd Random Thing: breakable objects aren’t really that complex to achieve.
Just create a “broke down” version of your mesh in your preferred 3d package (for those things i’d suggest Houdini, has great control over those functions), export it, texture it.
Then import in unity the NOT broken mesh. When you want it to break, just swap your mesh with the broken down version you made, add some rigidbodies and…well, here you have your destructible object
Check out this video at 2:03 for what I bet PhillipV is talking about. (I have no idea if this is something that comes with the latest version of PhysX.)
Here’s another one that specifically criticizes the method you mentioned.
Oh, allright, now i got what he mentioned, and yes, if the physics engine can handle that, it would be great.
But just something to say about the second video you posted. As you can see, the first wood block always breaks down into two pieces, and, as the comment says, it looks pretty always the same.
But if you break your mesh in a smart way, then, at the moment of the impact, swap it, set all the rigidbodies to kinematic, calculate the impact velocity etc…of the object you throw at your mesh, and then turn off kinematic on specific pieces, and add a specific force to them, and it should look AT LEAST decent, IMHO. Not saying it’s the same thing obviously , but could be a clever trick, no?
Right now, yes.
Practically only if ATI further refuses to add CUDA drivers.
There is nothing preventing them from doing so other than their pride and the potential inability to create CUDA drivers given that their normal drivers already bug enough
even if unity used the latest you couldn’t use it likely because there are no cuda enabled drivers for OSX so Unity potentially wouldn’t opt to use it.
And that the support is NVIDIA only is an ATI thing. they just don’t want to implement basic CUDA driver support although they could if they wanted. NVIDIA used opensource and commercially available technology for it and doesn’t mind telling about those.
Even the stuff in the video isn’t fully automatic: http://www.pixelux.ch/content/view/31/45/
(Pixelux is the company that created the “Digital Molecular Matter” seen in the Star Wars vid).
I haven’t seen any info on pricing, but I expect the DMM license is many times the price of Unity Pro.
, but could be a clever trick, no? 