Hi Would it be possible to create a simple and easy to use physics engine in MOI? Just to create moving assemblies and machines simulations, robots?

Hi DesertRaven, usually a physics mechanism is something that animation oriented programs would have - MoI is focused just on constructing models and not really on the area of generating animations or simulations so that's probably not going to be a fit for MoI anytime too soon. There is just still too much work still to do in the area of modeling before I can branch out into a totally different area like that, sorry.

- Michael

That's to bad.

Also I was not wanting an animation program. Just a small feature to do studies for designers who design moving parts.

Hi DesertRaven, unfortunately physics features are not at all easy to implement, a tremendous amount of effort and work would be required to do a good job of that.

Even just the process to design the UI for it would require a lot of work - it's unfortunate but actually making a design for things to work in a simple and easy way actually requires the most design effort in order to achieve.

So what you are asking for is a tremendously complex and difficult to implement feature, from the development side it is exactly the opposite of "just a small feature"...

Realistically I don't see how that would be possible anytime soon, complex and difficult features require a lot of time to implement - maybe you are not aware of it but I'm actually just one person working on all the development for MoI (and also do all the support like answering questions here) so it's not easy for me to work big and complex features like this into my schedule, sorry.

Since my resources are so limited I really need to focus a lot and so things that are pretty far outside of the core mission of model construction are not going to be high up on the priority list.

- Michael

Over at Alibre forum, been waiting 2 plus years for Motion2.
It is in beta now, so should be done "soon".
So making things move, based upon physics and physical properties, must be a very difficult project.

There is a free Physics SDK by N-Vidia


http://www.nvidia.com/object/physx-9.12.0613-driver.html

Hi Raven, one of the tricky things about some of the free physics SDKs out there is that they are all oriented towards games.

People usually expect a lot more accuracy out of CAD programs than out of games so sometimes that's not a good fit.

Also don't misunderstand that just having an SDK available is not the same thing as having an "automatic" feature added, there is still a lot of work involved even just in UI design like I mentioned previously.

It would certainly be a whole lot of fun to integrate physics into MoI, I really wish that I had the time available to do it. But everything I wrote previously about it not really being feasible still applies.

- Michael

I find that using the Unity engine for physics is very easy to learn.
http://unity3d.com/unity/engine/physics
They offer a free version if you just want to try it out.