The Essential Guide to Physics for Flash Games, Animation, and Simulations

Summary

This chapter introduced rigid body dynamics and collisions, and showed you how to model deformable bodies using mass-spring systems. Needless to say, what we have covered in this chapter is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many more topics on the general subject of extended systems that we can only briefly mention here: constrained systems, forward and inverse kinematics, and Verlet systems. Some of them can provide alternative approaches to simulating both rigid bodies and deformable bodies, but we do not have the space to include a discussion of them in this book.

This chapter completes Part III. In the first two chapters of Part IV, we will look at advanced numerical schemes and some other technical issues involved in creating ...