Customer Reviews

Physics Based Animation (Graphics)

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I've been working in collision detection and rigidbody simulation for several years now and there are not many books that cover stuff needed to get the knowledge to be able to develop a modern physics engine.

Rather then filling half of the book with basic linear algebra and stuff that no-one actually uses when developing realtime physics algorithms, this one actually discusses the good stuff.

Contact points generation, comparison of collision detection algorithms, iterative solvers, sph fluids, fem deformable etc.

Just buy it.

Erwin Coumans

http://www.continuousphysics.com

The authors figure that you are already an animator. You know the rudiments of programming animation in some language, but want to add more realism to the actions in your games.

The point of this book is to teach you how to go from understanding simple but useful physics equations to implementing these numerically and efficiently in your game. Probably the most obvious context are the equations of motion - where your objects obey gravity. And they conserve momentum and energy, up to a point. That is, you can build in friction into your system, for more realism. Ideally, all of this should make your game more plausible to a player, by conforming to her real world intuition.

The book also gives extensive coverage to collision detection methods. In many games, 2d or 3d, if you have objects moving around, how to quickly see when they might collide? Efficiency is often a key consideration.

Having said all this, it probably does help if you have had several undergraduate courses in physics and maths. So that what the book brings up doesn't throw you for a loop.

The book provides a complete overview of all the chapters physically based modeling of phenomena requires. However, the reader won't find a very detailed and easy to use description of certain methods. It can be regarded as a strong immersion into the realm of physics for games or simulations, especially for the novices in these fields.

I recommend this book for breadth of coverage and references. However, you will find many of the derivations very lacking and you will have to do a lot of work to prove them to yourself. Also, the mathematical typesetting is very much below par (they should have used LaTeX, which is industry standard!), so your eyes will hurt. I find myself copying out their formulas just so I can read them.

Good book with some problems. I would buy it again.