Game and art tools firm Luxology has debuted Recoil, a new plug-in for its modeling tool modo 501 that accurately simulates dynamic rigid body interactions.
Based on the popular open source Bullet physics engine, which is used extensively within the games and film industries, recoil realistically simulates dynamic forces and calculates accurate collisions between objects, allowing users to quickly create complex animations or automatically stack vast numbers of objects.
The plug-in was developed independently by Eric Soulvie using the modo Plug-in Software Development Kit (SDK) and runs on both the PC and Mac versions of modo 501.
Utilizing version 2.77 of the Bullet physics engine, recoil simplifies the setup and execution of complex physical simulations by combining robust collision detection with a variety of constraints, forces and controls. By simply tagging any mesh item to be dynamic, the object is ready to respond to forces like gravity or collisions from other objects in a modo scene.
"The integration of the Bullet rigid body dynamics into modo went very smoothly and the resulting animations are astonishingly realistic," said Eric Soulvie, the Seattle-based developer of the recoil plug-in.
"The recoil plug-in supports the option of collision detection directly with the Subdivision Surfaces, not just the cage geometry, which provides for more detailed simulation results."
