I would like to present our tool called pico which is a GPU based rendering engine and also
a realtime standalone engine. Our task is to make a 100% preview of your game inside Maya.
but of course this is not that much important
. The important thing is that we have made a physics support with the use of superb Bullet library. Currently it just supports rigid bodies
(active and passive) but we will successfully add new features. You will probably ask why?
Well first of all we needed that for our standalone projects (outside of Maya).
Next I found out that "Dynamica" uses an approach for integrating physics with Maya which
didn't satisfy my needs. Whenever I wanted to animate spheres and render them with mental ray
I had to write my own "revert rigid body" script on baked bodies. That's why I decided to
quickly write my own implementation taking into consideration that the physics must look
exactly the same in Maya and in standalone application but also they need to incorporate with
our renderer and any renderers that are available. Please notice that this was a very rapid
development (1 week) so there may be bugs present but we are here to help you out with them.
Again I would like to thank all people involved in creating bullet especially Erwin Coumans
for their wonderful job. Pico is available for free and it was recently used to create
"Linger In Shadows" for Playstation 3.
Below you'll find a movie that quickly describes how pico is working and link to main pico page.
Because of rapid development there is no tutorial or documentation on using physics yet
,but all GUI has been cut down to "Create Active Rigid Body", "Create Passive Rigid Body"
and "Revert Rigid Body" commands that can be accesed from "Pico->Physics" menu.
Cheers!
bonzaj/plastic
A movie describing pico
pico home page.