blake-mealey / chai3d-dynamics

About

This was made for an assignment in CPSC 599.86 - Computer Haptics at the University of Calgary under Dr. Sonny Chan. It uses the CHAI3D haptics engine.

It is a basic dynamics engine (rigidbody physics simulation) supporting dynamic and static rigidbodies with sphere colliders, and spring constraints. Note that the TorsionSpring is unfinished and broken.

Install

Unfortunately this will only work for Windows with Visual Studio, because I didn't bother with CMake. However, given its structure, it should be easy to port to other platforms using CMake.

The project is structured as a CHAI3D module, so after downloading and building CHAI3D, simply clone the project into the CHAI3D/modules directory, and then build with Visual Studio.

chai3d-dynamics

Controls

Control	Action
Space	Toggle workspace lock for the current scene (so you cannot move the workspace)
Left	Cycle scenes left
Right	Cycle scenes right
1	Spawn a heavy sphere at (0, 0, 1) in the current scene
2	Spawn a light ball at your cursor position attached by a "rope" spring (only applies force to correct elongation) in the current scene
3	Toggle the visibility of the mesh for the current scene
Device button	Delete objects touching the cursor

Notes

• Green springs denote close to natural length
• Red springs denote longer than natural length
• Yellow springs denote shorter than natural length
• "Springs" on the second scene and on the balls attached to the cursor are "ropes"
• As easily visualized by pressing 3, the third scene has the basic horizontal spring connections described in the assignment. The fourth scene adds criss-cross springs which results in a much stronger mesh.
• I attempted to get torsion springs working but failed.