Rigid Body Simulation Rigid body simulation entails computing the motion of rigid objects according to physical laws. Rigid body simulation requires many component algorithms to detect and respond to collisions, to model the forces between contacting bodies, and to compute the forward dynamics of bodies. These components of the system must work work harmoniously and robustly, despite the limitless range of systems that an application might present to a simulator. Background Rigid body simulation has obvious applications in CAD and solid modeling. It is useful for rapidly prototyping mechanical systems ranging from simple mechanisms to assembly lines and mobile robots.
Video games provide further applications.
Computer graphics practitioners have used and studied rigid body simulation, but generally in limited contexts. Because of the complexity and computational cost of the algorithms, simplifying assumptions are often made, for example, only modeling collisions and contacts with a ground plane. Computational efficiency and physical accuracy are subordinate goals. We are simultaneously pushing on many fronts in the hope of extending the capabilities of current rigid body simulators. These are traditional bottlenecks and one of the places where numerical problems can cause a simulator to break.