FEMFX, a new multithreaded CPU library made for deformable physics with the Finite Element Method, was just made available by AMD as part of GPUOpen.
Developers can get the source code for FEMFX on GitHub, alongside a few samples and a plugin for the popular Houdini 3D animation software. There's also an Unreal Engine 4 plugin available here.
Check out how FEMFX looks in the GIFs below prepared by AMD, as well as additional details on how it works.
Solid objects are represented as a mesh of tetrahedral elements, and each element has material parameters that control stiffness, how volume changes with deformation, and stress limits where fracture or plastic (permanent) deformation occur. The model supports a wide range of materials and interactions between materials. We intend for these features to complement rather than replace traditional rigid body physics. The system is designed with the following considerations:
- Fidelity: realistic-looking wood, metal, plastic, even glass, because they bend and break according to stress as real materials do.
- Deformation effects: non-rigid use cases such as soft-body objects, bending or warping objects. It is not just a visual effect, but materials will resist or push back on other objects.
- Changing material on the fly: you can change the settings to make the same object behave very differently, e.g., turn gelatinous or melt.
- Interesting physics interactions for gameplay or puzzles.
The library uses extensive multithreading to utilize multicore CPUs and benefit from the trend of increasing CPU core counts.
Features
- Elastic and plastic deformation
- Implicit integration for stability with stiff materials
- Kinematic control of mesh vertices
- Fracture between tetrahedral faces
- Non-fracturing faces to control shape of cracks and pieces
- Continuous collision detection (CCD) for fast-moving objects
- Constraints for contact resolution and to link objects together
- Constraints to limit deformation
- Dynamic control of tetrahedron material parameters
- Support for deforming a render mesh using the tetrahedral mesh
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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