Golems 3d sandbox physics simulation program

[Furcurequs]

Thanks for the info, Zhyrra.

I have an older cousin whose husband started his own tool and die company decades ago. I was still just a kid at the time myself. (I'm 52.) I believe they actually run it together now, or at least they did when I last saw them, but it was his initial passion.

It's been years since I've seen them, but they had some rather expensive CNC equipment even back then, I believe. I think that included an EDM machine that they were rather proud of. I remember them describing how it used an electric arc to eat away material.

From what I understand, they did the sort of work you are talking about for some of the major manufacturers here.

Thanks for the compliment about the renders. I never really did much more than a little experimentation, unfortunately.

As far as the email brides go, I don't remember the name of the particular website those were from. When I rescue my files from my old failing hard drive, the address may turn up, though. ;P

There are plenty of websites like that online, however. Just search "Russian brides" or maybe "Ukrainian brides" (or perhaps the country of your choice). I just read an article that said there was a surplus of women over there - like over 3 million extra - so they are looking for options.

Also, apparently the life expectancy for men in that part of the world is only about 62 which is 10 years less than that of the women. Anyway, there are certainly some rather attractive available women from what I can tell.

As matter of fact, I maybe should have pursued that route rather than wasting my time with a middle eastern gal I just happened to meet in an online chatroom not long after skimming those websites. That thing didn't end so well. ...lol

I have a friend who has a Filipina bride he initially got to know through snail mail. He did do some face to face chatting with her online before he finally went there and met her in person and brought her home with him.

Back to the subject of software, there is a live DVD Linux distribution called CAELinux that is devoted to Computer Aided Engineering and which is loaded with open source software that I'm going to download and try. It may take me a few days to get it downloaded, though.

http://caelinux.com/

The latest version (2013) will supposedly only run on a 64 bit machine. Fortunately, the old computer I salvaged from the dump has one of the first processors capable of that. I've tried some small 64 bit live Linux distributions and they seem to run fine, so I should be okay.

Someone with a 32 bit cpu would have to download the older 2008 version of CAELinux.

[Furcurequs]

Well, I'm currently downloading the iso image for the CAELinux live DVD. Only about 18 hours to go. (It's nearly 4 GB in size.) It can be burned to a DVD or put on a flash drive and then run from those. It can also then be installed on a hard drive, if one wants.

It supposedly contains MBDyn, a multi-body dynamics analysis software that I've mentioned before, along with a Blender interface. So, that might be about the best we can do when it comes to free tools for modeling and analyzing 3D mechanical designs.

This Linux distribution is a couple of years old, though, so it probably doesn't have the latest version of Blender which apparently has another Physics engine of its own.

Once I get this downloaded and running, I may add the latest version of Blender, too, to compare their functionality.

Anyway, when the live DVD or flash drive is run, all the included engineering software should already be installed, set up and ready to run.

For those who haven't tried Linux, I would highly recommend checking it out - especially some of these dedicated distributions. I'll probably be downloading one geared around audio/video production next.

[agor95]

Thank you for your posts. It is good to get the options in one place.

It is a good read.

[Furcurequs]

You're welcome, and thanks. ...and sorry I didn't respond sooner.

It seems I didn't get back to this thread after I downloaded the CAELinux .iso file.

I installed CAELinux on my hard drive and everything seemed to work okay - the 64 bit version.

I've not really spent much time exploring what is on it, though. It does seem to have lots of highly technical tools installed and ready to run.

It appears it might take some work to get MBDyn running with Blender, so I would probably just recommend the latest version of Blender itself since it now has a built in physics engine.

With Blender's modeling tools and now its built in physics engine, it may be about the most powerful free simulation tool available to us, unless of course we would rather use other math tools and/or programming languages to write our own simulations.

https://www.blender.org

Manual pages for its rigid body physics:

https://www.blender.org/manual/physics/ ... index.html

This is a nice how-to on using gears and making chains:

"Blender 2.66 - Beginners Clockwork Physics Tutorial "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi6MxMM09Ek

"Introduction to Rigid Body Simulations"

http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/qu ... y-physics/

Here's a beautiful animated gif of a double Cardan (universal) joint made in Blender:

https://dribbble.com/shots/1833828-Double-Cardan-Joint

...just a neat simulation:

"MouseTrap Physics using Blender Realtime Bullet Integration"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RAzLcMs7Do

...another nice one:

"Blender 2.66 Animation - Rigid Body Dynamics, Gears and Dynamic Paint "

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV3DF2etolM

Dwayne

[jim_mich]

Hmmm... there is something on the first page of this thread that is triggering my anti-virus blocker. Trend Micro says the page is dangerous and blocks it as soon as it starts to load.

I'm not sure what is going on. Could be a false alert.

PS. Everything on page one is from six months ago.

[ME]

I guess the mpeg's or that "windows95"-stuff, or "microsoft" in general; my browser just ignores it.

Code: Select all

<embed type="application/x-mplayer2" pluginspage="http&#58;//www.microsoft.com/windows95/downloads/contents/wurecommended/s_wufeatured/mediaplayer/default.asp" src="files/test6.mpg" name="MediaPlayer2" showcontrols="1" showdisplay="0" showstatusbar="1" autosize="1" autostart="0" visible="1" animationatstart="0" loop="0" title="undefined">

[Furcurequs]

Blender is going to take some time learn, I'm afraid. There is just so much stuff packed into it that it's hard to find where everything is.

Here's a real world ring, disc and sphere test:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8psVQHHUEcI

The attached video is my Blender version of that. I just made the objects and let them roll.

It looks like the results are what they should be.

I believe the default dimensions when modeling things are in meters, though. So, I had to speed up my animation by 4 times to make it look more like something we would expect to see.

I guess my original animation had 2 meter diameter objects being seen from far away.

I'll have to remember to properly scale things if I use Blender for simulations.

I tried to get a bit fancy with the rendering, but my video doesn't look so good online. I'll have to mess around until I find something that shows up well.

[Furcurequs]

I've been doing some more experiments with Blender, and the more I work with it, the more impressed I am. As far as simulation software goes, it may be the most powerful free program I've yet used.

It certainly does take some getting used to, however. It's definitely not as straightforward as some of the simpler sandbox programs.

Though Blender seems to have many powerful built in tools, it really takes some digging to find out how to use them.

Once I get used to some of the features, however, and their associated "hot keys," it afterwards seems quite simple to work with them. It really does take a whole lot of digging, though, and for me, also, the watching of youtube tutorials.

Anyway, I thought I would post a couple of my latest experiments. I'm currently just trying to gain familiarity with how to set things up - things like hinges, collisions, and whatnot.

I'm also trying to learn about the rendering features as I go, too, so these are a little more visually realistic than they would have to be, of course. Thus far my fairly simple physics simulations seem to display in real time with the built in "OpenGL" rendering.

Rendering the frames for these videos may have taken hours, though, because of the features I'm using with the ray tracing renderer.

I call my first work "Anodized Cubism":





...and the second one "Floating Glass Disk with Dangling Mirrored Balls" (...okay, I forgot to hit the smooth button, but anyway...):




Oh, and I'm just being a goof with the titles. ...lol

I am learning the dos and don'ts, though, of the program. I think in the second video there is a problem with some collisions with the swinging balls. There are ways to correct that - like by increasing the mesh size or linking the primitive shapes in different ways.


Oh, and while checking out some pictures of anodized objects when thinking about one of my video titles, I discovered colorful anodized socket wrenches!! If mine were like these, maybe I wouldn't lose so many!

https://www.google.com/search?q=anodize ... t&tbm=isch

[agor95]

@Furcurequs 2016-04-29

Good Luck with your studies.

Invest some time in this product and it will pay you many times over.

[Furcurequs]

agor95,

Thanks.

I believe that Blender is now such a powerful program with so many users and such a large developer base that any time spent learning how to use it certainly won't be wasted. Commercial software this powerful would probably cost thousands of dollars.

That it is open source is also a plus in my book in that it can be relatively easily altered if necessary to add features or to interface with other programs.

There is a new version of "Blender and MBDyn" out, for instance, and I was able to install it as an add-on feature to the latest Blender with just a few mouse clicks.

https://github.com/gdbaldw/BlenderAndMBDyn

MBDyn is an open source multi-body dynamics software that even NASA uses, and so it gives another option for a physics engine.

MBDyn

METECS is the developer and maintainer of NASA's MBDyn dynamics engine. MBDyn is an open source, highly optimized, configurable dynamics engine that NASA uses to simulate and analyze rigid and flexible multibody systems. The simulated systems may consist of multiple groups of articulated chain, tree, or closed-loop topologies. Transient topologies are handled with conservation of energy and momentum. The solution for rigid-body systems is exact and several configurable levels of non-linear term fidelity are available for flexible multibody systems. The algorithms have been optimized for efficiency and can be used for both nonreal-time and real-time simulations...

http://www.metecs.com/services-dynamics.php

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20120014136

https://www.mbdyn.org/

Blender already had physics built in to its game engine, apparently, but now it has the "Bullet" (that's the program name) physics engine to use with its animation features, and then MBDyn is another add-on alternative.

It appears that the MBDyn Blender interface includes the ability to plot things, which would be nice, but I don't yet know if this will work with parameters set up for the other physics engine. At the moment, I kind of doubt that it does, but I'm holding out a little hope.

It seems all these physics engines work independently of each other, so it's more like being able to just access each from the same graphical user interface.

One of those robot simulation programs I was looking at before would allow for the seamless switching between physics engines so as to compare results. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this is currently possible with Blender. It appears one has to set up each model specifically for the engine being used. I can see both pros and cons to this.

Having to set things up differently for different engines would force one to think about the design a bit more, I would think, which could be good.

Anyway, I've already been able to simulate some mechanisms for my actual device designs in Blender that I was unable to simulate in the 2D program Physion. I would have had to have scripted a work-around in that program using JavaScript - and I had not gotten around to doing that.

It was rather simple to set things up in Blender, however, which means I should now be able to simulate my full designs in Blender alone.

I don't know which I'll complete first, though, my Blender models or my real world test devices.

Take care.

Dwayne

[agor95]

Thanks for the links.

Spent some time looking into the Blender manual.
Also checked my blender install.

I checked out the mbdyn product and it looks like a python library.

So all good software and they have there place is the tool kit.