Understanding and Working with Physics Engines

Overview
The purpose of this broad ranging course whose goals is to inspire, fascinate and nurture a sense of curiosity, adventure and intellectual striving by exploring a modeling approach to those aspects of the natural world addressed by physics. The topics covered, in fairly broad brushtrokes, in this course are developed further in some of our other more focused and specialised courses. It is possible to take this course first and then to study more specialised courses such as differential equations for computer games developers, or to come from such courses this course in order to gain a more balance overview of the relationship between computer games, physics, mathematics and modeling. The course concentrates mainly on games engines targeting classical physics and mechanics, and strategies for learning how to tackle working with complex frameworks and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The main parts of the course are laid out below. It goes without saying, that, as with most FTT courses, this course can be tailored and adapter in a variety of ways so as to form the basis of something more specialised. Attendees, coming to Carshalton, will have access to a wide variety of reference books that are part of FTT's extensive collection of books, reference papers and software resources.

Key Skills

• an integrated perspective on classical physics and its applicability for games devlopers and simulator developers
• strategies for mastering complex knowledge and software frameworks
• enhancing scientific and artistic creativity through an understanding and exploration of physics engines
• a foundation for greater and better things

Course Contents

• Basic Newtonian Mechanics
• units, measures, co-ordinate systems
• vectors and matrices
• centre of mass, angular momentum and moments of inertia
• Newton's laws of motion
• Inertia tensor, spinning tops and gyroscopes
• Basic Kinematics
• velocity and acceleration
• frames of reference
• motion of rigid bodies
• angular velocity and angular acceleration
• Forces
• force fields
• friction
• basics of drag and fluid dynamics
• Archimedes principle and buoyancy
• springs and dampers
• oscillations and waves
• Applied topics
• particles, bodies and collisions
• projectiles
• aircraft
• ships
• cars
• Strategies for representing and solving equations of motion
• integration of equations of motion
• physics and software strategies for modeling collision responses
• rotation and quaternions
• strategies for dealing with many body systems
• parallel computing strategies for modeling complex systems - an overview
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• multi-threading
• working with cell-processor architectures
• computer clusters
• working with graphics processing units e.g. using CUDA