Five Steps to Adding Physics-Based Realism

Lisa writes: "Colliding billiard balls. Missile trajectories. Cornering dynamics in speeding cars. If these type of actions are expressed in computer software, applying physics-based models can greatly enhance the level of realism. David M. Bourg offers five steps towards doing just that in this LinuxDev Center article."

Physics in movies

[Doppler00]

What about the physics in movies such as Final Fantasy? The character detail was very well done, but the physics of their motions and mouth movements were terrible. I think that more attention needs to be put into making the physics more organic than increasing the polygon count.

Re:Physics in movies

[Doppler00]

Not all of the motion was done using actors though. The speech for example was hand animated for each sound they made. I thought this looked horrible compared to other motion in the movie. Information on how they did it was included on the DVD version of Final Fantasy. It's a bit long to watch, but interesting.

Where was this when I needed it?

[Chelloveck]

Crud! Why couldn't this book have come out 5 years ago when I was actually doing game development? Oh well, at least Chris Hecker's physics articles in Game Developer [gdmag.com] came at the right time.

BTW, if anyone happens to see a Simpsons Bowling [newspringfield.com] arcade machine in the Chicago area, let me know where. I'd love to see if my physics model made it into the final production.