Thanks for the reply. There are currently three main things that I can do in the core API that I haven’t been able to figure out in the extended API. I should probably download the source code for the extended API at some point.
- It would be cool if I could use springs directly. I tried reusing some springs from a fake cloth asset (changed particle indices) but it didn’t seem to work. Springs could be useful for stitching objects together, creating joints / hinges, distance constraints and motors.
- For the animated character I updated the rest positions so there’s a particle per vertex. This is impractical for a high res model, what I’d really like to do is use a soft body and animate its rest positions. I’m guessing that soft bodies work similar to rigid bodies with rest positions / shapes that modify the mesh using bones rather than verts. It would be great if I could edit these settings (might be able to already but I haven’t found them).
- When creating assets it would be useful if I could send in some fixed particle positions e.g flexExtCreateRigidFromMesh. This could be used to stitch objects together. For example, a rigid body car and a soft body antenna could have three particles (a triangle on each object) linked with zero length springs.
I’ve been thinking about trying something like Samcon or Trajectory Optimization. It would be great if there was an easy way to save and continue from a current state (even if the simulation isn’t deterministic).
It looks like GameWorks supports a large set of features. It would be really cool (but unlikely) if it included something like AIWorks. CMA-ES and Neural Nets seem to be very popular in some of the articulated character animation papers I’ve been looking at. It would be useful if I had a library of common AI tools that ran on the graphics card (I should probably try to learn cuda one day).