Unity Bullet Physics Plugin Demo

See the Youtube post in the facebook page feed.

Facebook - Unity Bullet Physics

Youtube - Unity 3D Bullet Physics (Performance Box Rigidbody Tests)

Youtube - Basic Demo - Unity Bullet Physics

I'm currently planning on releasing an asset in a few months at the latest. I'm also curious on how much the community is interested in Bullet Physics as an option to PhysX.

Current Plan:
Release v1.0.0 around July.

v1.0.0 core
-win32 support for Rigidbodies and Softbodies for the new Bullet Physics 2.8.0
-full access to all c++ library classes
-helper classes for Unity 3D workflow
-Gizmos and Debug support for core library

v1.0.0 features
-performance at least as good or better than PhysX
-port all applicable c++ Bullet Physics demos to Unity scenes

Future Goals:
I don't see why I can't support all the platforms that Unity already supports with enough time

Barriers to a full product:
I would like to work on this full time, but I currently already have work doing 3D simulations. If enough interest is out there I would love to make this a perfect product with much better tools than PhysX is currently providing to the Unity community. I'm also interested in what you all think is a fair price as I am more interested in getting Bullet in the hands of the community because of it's amazing performance and tools.

Lastly, I've been actively using and following the community and I really appreciate the great tools and support other developers have provided myself.

Best of luck,
~chbfiv

 

Best if this support cloth!!
u3d's cloth is .....

 

Cloth is in the works =)

For those whom are interested I currently have these notes on the project.

see Bulletphysics.org for more.

1. I'm seeing a 20% improvement in performance for standard rigidbody simulations vs PhysX running off of the CPU.
2. "Bullet 2.80 includes a preview of the GPU rigid body pipeline by Takahiro Harada, running 100% on the GPU using OpenCL. A new AMD Radeon 7970 Tahiti can simulate 110k objects in real-time between 15-30 frames/second. It also works on recent NVIDIA GPUs with latest drivers." -bulletphysics.org; I can't make the same claim yet, but I intend on looking into this.
3. Bullet Physics supports Motors out of the box for constraints. So you can create crazy motor simulations (think AI spider, ...) by just using the properties of the constraints themselves. One of the Bullet Physics demos illistrates this and I plan to include as a unity scene.
4. Unity Bullet Physics seems significantly more stable at the point you start simulating ridiculousness compared to PhysX.
5. Bullet Physics is open source so you can use my c# wrapper or the c++ lib to create a server to simulate for multiplayer physics. Since both the client side and server side physics are using Bullet Physics you can accurately approve client side actions. I'm currently unaware of a similar option for PhysX, but feel free to enlighten me!
6. Bullet has lots of destruction options.
7. Bullet was Ranked 2nd for middleware use by casual developers over PhysX by Game Developer Magazine in 2011

 

I'll be watching this development with interest. Please also post a direct link to the youtube video, if you would, so those of us who don't use FaceBook and see it.

 

Would be interested in the server side option mentioned above- especially if there is some sensible way of syncing (faster) rigidbodies with a server.

 

Cool initiative. Out of curiosity, supposing you intend to run it multi-threaded, how would you sync that to Unity?

 

Thanks for the tip. I'll start adding links for both.

Facebook - Unity Bullet Physics

Youtube - Unity 3D Bullet Physics (Performance Box Rigidbody Tests)

Youtube - Basic Demo - Unity Bullet Physics

 

I don't plan on providing this feature for v1 myself. The c# wrapper or c++ library can be used with Sockets or a webservice to provide the required functionality. I am pondering this however for future releases on App Engine or a Node.js backend.

 

Good question =) I need to investigate this further. Bullet Physics can be built with this support, but I'm currently unaware of any bottlenecks until I get to that Unity Demo.

 

What about joints and ropes? Ropes made with PhysX joints run into issues with the joints stretching. Check out Jake's rope script thread for more info on the issue.

 

It's been my opinion for a couple years now that Unity aught to replace the current Nvidia Physx with bullet. I mean, seriously. The current implementation is just too much of a black box and very stagnant.

 

Damn, you beat me to it!
I was just starting to integrate Bullet physics.

 

Awesome work... very important you succeed. May I inquire on an ETA for a first release?

 

Bullet Physics YES PLEASE

 

Or havok. How about that? Or even just improving physx to latest version. But I applaud op's initiative

 

I for one would look forward to seeing Bullet Physics within Unity. I think it's a great free open source physics engine and more than a match for Havok and PhysX of which I have alot of experience.

I actually coded my motorbike and car dynamics using Bullet, then made sure I could easily swap in any phyiscs engine, such as Havok and PhysX. Here are a couple of links to my motorbike and car dyamics using various physics engines Bullet/PhysX/Havok and Sony PhyreEngine/Ogre for rendering.

Bike
Car
car in San Fran

I then seen the light and ported to Unity c#, you can play the motorbike here, or the car here and the forum thread here.

PhysX is nicely integrated into Unity and takes care of a hell of alot of setup (not a problem for game professionals), so any other physics implementation needs to match this, whether it is Bullet, Havok, or even Box 2d.

 

Hello,

This looks excellent. I'm currently working on a project that's beyond the scope of Unity's PhysX engine - would it be possible to test the alpha?

 

Very interesting!
You stated that you would release 1.0 around July, any new ETA on this?
Or is this project already abandoned?

Edit: Saw your other post, i hope its possible to solve this and get 1.0 released.

 

would this support cylinder colliders ?

 

Hippocoder,
Havok will not work because of their licensing models unless they team up with Unity in some way. I doubt it though, they have their own visualization and various other products that directly compete with Unity.

 

Gonzorob,
I'll get back to you on this after the final plan is in place =)

 

LS16BMX,
Yes, all of the shapes that come with Bullet Physics including cylinders and custom shapes.

 

Virror,
I'm working on a plan with the Bullet Physics team to make this project come to life =) no ETA, but I'll have something soon to update the ETA.

 

We started integrating Bullet in our game, but if you guys have done something better, would be great to know. Keep us posted.

Our game is 400% physics, and our initial Bullet test was overwhelmingly better than Unity's.

 

how hard do you think the integration will be, how can you make it work with all the unity components (you know rigid bodies and stuff)

 

I would love to know hw to incorporate bullet into unity, any clues much appreciated for sure !

 

Not trying to rush you or anything but this would be a nice addition ..since currently im trying to make destructible objects in Unity 3D for a fully destructible map... after about 5 cubes (with 150 parts) break apart the computer slows down to about 2FPS ..im on an AMD system with these specs..

FX-8150 8-Core @3.6GHz(auto-turbo of 3.9 and 4.2)
16gigs of DDR3 1866mhz ram
HD7870 2gig GDDR5 stock OCed graphics card

We all know physX hates AMD systems...except the Untiy devs it seems ..haha ...so im not trying to rush you or anything but I cant wait for you to release this Bullet physics option... nice work ...I clicked on "like" on facebook also.

 

unity is a great engine, bullet is a great physics engine, I love bullet because it is open source.

I'm looking forward to it.

 

Any progress?

 

Yeah, any news? I'm in need of this and I'd hate to reinvent the wheel. if its not ready yet for the Store, post it on github with a PayPal link and I'll send you a couple hundred.

 

Good job! I am interested too!

how can we test this?

.

 

Interested indeed
Cloth is my main interest, paying if needed.
Keep it up.

 

Don't bother unless it's cross platform though. Those windows-only assets aren't the biggest money makers.

 

How can it be cross platform if bullet is written as a native win32 library?

Also I'd like to test bullet in Unity too. I've tested BEPUPhysics and it showed really bad performance in Unity so I seek for a replacement.

Added. I found ready bullet example for unity and tested it. It's really fast! I'm going to use it for my server instead of bepu.

 

Umm.. you found it but not sharing? ..PM me if you don't want to post the link here..

 

I know one example of using Bullet in Unity: https://code.google.com/p/unity-bullet/

 

I used that one: https://github.com/speps/UnityBullet

 

Would this physics system be completely deterministic?

Multiplayer rts in mind.

 

Any updates?

 

Share the love rozgo and Rawbots team and make a free plugin for the community. I hear Erwin Coumans himself helped so time to give back. There are two I found but are very early in development and you guys must have found a way to make all the constraints and many features in Bullet work so maybe add to one or create your own.
https://code.google.com/p/unity-bullet/

https://github.com/speps/UnityBullet

 

Would be good if they sold it on the Asset Store even, that way they could make some money back for their time. It'd be better than the nothing we have now.

 

There's a huge amount of work to integrate a third-party physics engine into Unity. And it's not just about writing a bunch of components for different kinds of shapes and joints, it's also about materials, trigger and collision events, thread synchronization, terrains, character controllers, messing with object meshes for soft bodies, various custom editors, visualization, user API for raycasts, collision detection, etc.

Until you have all this stuff up and running, you would probably prefer to use PhysX. And even when you have it running, you may realize it's not worth the effort. PhysX is not as bad after all.

 

This.

You can't do lockstep networking with Physx.
You also can't do replays that use physics.

 

Also asking: Any ETA on this?

Also would be good if an android version is in the works.

But also, would this be unity free compatible?

 

Guys, just no. What are you clamouring for Bullet for? it's literally ten times slower than the physics in Unity 5.

The only advantages to bullet are probably in the movie industry where they can code parts of it in a bespoke fashion or if you really really need deterministic physics and are willing to take some pain.

 

What's with the stability tests showing PhysX is less stable then!?
And we can't evaluate the claim Unity 5 has fast physics until I actually see it running in a game of my own. (A YouTube clip won't count here, as that's using Unity's own code, of which would probably be completely different from mine)

 

How about the fact that you can thread bullet physics whereas you cannot with Unity's implementation? Expensive things like static mesh creation can now be offloaded to another thread. Physics simulation can also be threaded.

I highly doubt Unity 5's physics is even 50% faster.

 

Exactly! That's the reason why GTA 4 and
5 uses bullet or it could be that they were
making RAGE so awesome in all things
that they forgot to include a physics
engine in it

 

Looks like this is dead...

EDIT: Removed user reference, didn't make sense...

 

??