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More Personal Professional resources to 3D Physics department.

Discussion in 'Physics' started by AlanMattano, Jun 9, 2018.

  1. AlanMattano

    AlanMattano

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2013
    Posts:
    1,501
    Did you notice that nothing happens in 3D physics?, Physics Questions with no answer, Physics tutorials are too simple or missing [configurable joint] There are nor Physics Feedbacks under review, planned or started. Looks like nothing planned in roadmap about fixing 3D. There is nothing in the beta section of the forum or in the research department. But there are deprecated good features.

    And Physics is a fundamental part because almost every game is made using PhysX.

    For example visual feedback for beginners and artist. Configurable Joint Video Tutorials. Do you use 3D water soft collider? Colliders with different colours. Separate Layer. Collision booleans. My suspicion that there are only a few persons left in this sector. I was able to count 2 at lest. And working on a physics scenes granular level and looks like there will be multi-world support but not solving actual problems.

    Make your voice ask Unity for more team, resources and time!

     
  2. yant

    yant

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Jul 24, 2013
    Posts:
    595
    Hey Alan

    My name's Anthony and I'm part of the Unity's physics team.

    There's actually been a bunch of stuff rolled out lately. You might have noticed Physics.Simulate() that allowed to create some interesting scattering tools for the very first time in Unity 17.1 (there was a lengthy forum discussion about it). There was quite a significant effort put into decoupling setting transform from writing its values to PhysX (Physics.SyncTransforms, Physics.autoSyncTransforms) that allowed multi-threading of parts of physics in 17.2. Speaking of multi-threading, there is a new raycasting API that allows running raycasts in a batch off the main thread in 18.1.

    Speaking about the closest future, 2018.3 is going to be packed with features. We're planning to roll out the PhysX 3.4.2 upgrade that allows devs to use THE latest version of that physics engine for the very first time ever. We're exposing interesting features there, and many more to come soon. Speaking of the beta forums, there is a post where you can download the PhysX upgrade working with 18.2. We're publishing a really great multi-scene API that allows you to do what's never been possible before, e.g. pre-compute trajectories of bodies.

    I can imagine some requests were not fulfiled yet, and some bugs were probably not yet addressed but I wouldn't personally think this could serve good grounds for claiming there were no physics team and no physics features were ever exposed.

    Thanks for your interest in physics.

    Yours,
    Anthony
    R&D Physics
     
    hippocoder, AlanMattano and Edy like this.
  3. jbaumer6

    jbaumer6

    Joined:
    Mar 12, 2018
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    15
    Wait wait wait. Where is the documentation for running raycast off the main thread? This is amazing. Please link.
     
  4. yant

    yant

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Jul 24, 2013
    Posts:
    595
  5. AlanMattano

    AlanMattano

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2013
    Posts:
    1,501
    I'm sorry, is simple to me from my side to just make a critic. Making a critic is very simple because we are actually spectators not making the job. So is simple to judge from far away.

    Unity you are giving development to UI, VR, Multiplayer, CPU, GPU, Shaders, Rendering, etc so awesome


    Like the monkey, I want more PhysX!

    Anthony Looks like is not a good idea to put more resources in your team?
    I wish just to let you know as a user about what I was thinking along this years.
    I was trying to help the physics team department, asking Unity for more resources to be more balance.
    That was my intention and "impression" because there is not that much on the blog about PhysX
    https://blogs.unity3d.com/page/2/?s=PhysX
    I can read about the team difficulties,
    And at the same time in the physics the feedback section I can read:
    • 9 declined and that is a lot compared to,
    • 0 active,
    • 0 under review,
    • 0 planed!
    • 0 started
    • and only 15 completed.
    Tell me you, Is there enough resources in Unity about "3D PhysX" side?

    I was suspecting there was not a "PhysX" department inside the physics team.
    I'm asking to Unity: I wish Unity make a PhysX department inside the physics team so that can make advance development, improving PhysX and work close to Nvidia in this subject. Like the monkey: I want a PhysX guru gem inside the team!


    But don't worry that much, because looking my 2 votes I assume that nobody cares except for me and one more another user.

    I also miss the raycast documentation (and the 2 video). That probably is because is missing a tool or some kind of documentation differences between versions that let us know what are actually the improvements between different versions inside the Documentation and API. (I put that in other feedback too.)
     
    Last edited: Jun 11, 2018
  6. AlanMattano

    AlanMattano

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2013
    Posts:
    1,501
    I apologize, Anthony, was not personal or direct to you.

    I claim that there was no team because a team use to work together in unity to achieve the same goal.

    As a user, I can only say please @Joachim_Ante don't do that: I appreciate a lot the effort, you are the best in the world so is difficult for others following you at full speed, at the same time the integrity of the team is important. In the long run, forming new personal is inefficient and expensive. Unity includes everyone on a big team like a family does. I know is hard choosing collaborators especially if they explode in overreaction, but I know you got a super awesome team. Don't lose it in that way. At Pininfarina one day when I return to work, the security service makes me enter first, the door opens automatically, and other colleagues were clapping at me when I was walking down the corridors. That makes me feel so well and restored. All the colleagues clapping to how finished the task. Like the UI, nested prefabs, etc. Also, we users need to learn to clap more to each Unity individual task achievements!
     
    Last edited: Jun 11, 2018
  7. hippocoder

    hippocoder

    Digital Ape

    Joined:
    Apr 11, 2010
    Posts:
    29,723
    What is it in physics you cannot achieve at present? I am really happy with current feature set. I have made my own character controller thanks to compute penetration. The performance is very nice.

    Is it possible to run compute penetration and compute nearest point also off main thread? @yant or specifically, what is off main thread so I can further optimise my controller :) thanks.
     
  8. AlanMattano

    AlanMattano

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2013
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    You hit the point: I do not find any wall limitations for something in particular, but It took me lot of time. I make workarounds and I'm not finding bugs that are often reported. In the Feedbacks are also included mine. But I feel we users are making all the same and can be optimized. Like shaders in U4 I was able to make my own reflections and PBR materials by my self but the progress was much better than my own custom shaders. Is like we are using programming the GUI when now we use a simpler new visual UI. a PhysX for the artist!

    I'm just the monkey asking for more: 350 Feedbacks aside, at the present is difficult to configure the configurable joint without visual feedback for a beginner. A visual setup configurable joint via editor is a better idea than changing the values in the inspector. There is no soft collider in 3D or soft collision so I make it via C# a water collider. There are a lot of Joints Types and just one example video tutorial. And just only the configurable joint merite more than one live session video. Limited the imagination at the beginning.
    There is PhysX Version improvement but not what (new things) we can do with this improvements. The collision colours for debugging was a good idea for improving visual feedback. I can't put a collider and combine them in boolean operation. Passing from 2D physics to 3D physics was difficult to achieve since are different. I do not want to repeat what is inside feedback.
     
    hippocoder likes this.
  9. mauriciosaro

    mauriciosaro

    Joined:
    Feb 20, 2018
    Posts:
    5
    Hi guys, I found this thread while looking for alternatives for our team.

    We are using Unity as a simulation for path planning of robot arms. This mainly requires collision checking and other relevant information such as shortest distances between colliders from the physics engine. We also require to be able to access the simulation from various different threads that work at different speeds. For example, arm hardware will be constantly updating the simulation with it's current position every 4ms, while sensors might be changing object positions every 8-20 ms and in a different thread we have the planner querying for collisions.

    After much research into the new changes and the new job system added to Unity, I still don't think what we need can be done with Unity and it's default Physx integration.

    Our current solution is to integrate the Bullet physics engine through Bullet# in Unity. We then create a main Bullet world which is in synch with Unity and various copied worlds which are used by the different threads. This require that we move objects in the Bullet simulation from other threads and then synch with Unity in the main thread.

    While the solution works, I am curious if there is a more straightforward approach or if someone has some experience doing something similar with Unity.

    Thanks in advance
     
  10. AlanMattano

    AlanMattano

    Joined:
    Aug 22, 2013
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    1,501
    Wellcome to this forum @mauriciosaro congratulations your first post!
    Here we are talking about Physx development has less new features than in other departments.
    As Hippo mention, is difficult to find something that is not possible to be made inside the Unity editor and current feature are working! I think your request merit a specific thread. Remember to include a good specific question in the title. Somone with more experience than me will answer. Unity is very flexible and there are also alternative physics assets. But involves from the user side a bit of knowledge and research.
     
  11. mauriciosaro

    mauriciosaro

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    AlanMattano likes this.
  12. AlanMattano

    AlanMattano

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