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Session Name:

Dancing with the Wind

Overview:

Modern games have evolved over the past few years to include real-time physics that animates much of the game world, including colliding and tumbling rigid bodies, flying machines, articulated rag-doll characters, water and smoke. In the real-world, wind and water affect objects, causing trees to sway, leaves to flutter, enabling airplanes to fly and fish to swim. To date, the use of wind and water effects has fallen primarily into categories such as complex aerodynamic loading calculations for airplanes in flight simulators, simple wind resistance on objects in a strong wind, or buoyancy and water resistance on objects moving through a body of water, and water/smoke/fluid simulation of various sorts. This lecture focuses on the practical application of computationally cheap aerodynamics calculations that can liven up the game world, and illustrates the inputs and outputs of these calculations as applied within modern real-time game physics engines.

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  • GDC 2006
  • Graham Rhodes
  • Applied Research Associates, Inc.
  • free content
  • Programming
  • Programming