Hi All,

I'm a newbie in the world of game physics engine.

Does Havok Physics Engine have a feature like the one Euphoria from Natural Motion has?

Something like this :

Or if Havok doesn't have, do you guys have another alternative for that? Since Natural Motion doesn't release the Euphoria Engine.

Thanks

I've seen lots of academic versions published, mostly at SIGGRAPH. We developed our own in-house over the course of several years; it is not an easy problem, as you can imagine. I'm not aware of anything off the shelf, let alone open source, that is able to do any kind of physics driven character movement.

Thanks for your reply Promit, It seems that we have no choice than to postpone the idea for another time, since our studio is pretty small and we're right now really on a tight budget. Do you have any experience in working using Havok? I'm just wondering, Havok is pretty big engine and it has been used by a lot of AAA games, but I find it strange if Havok doesn't have this feature considering physics driven character has been shown to public by Natural Motion since 2006 CMIIW.

Hi eatmicco,

Havok animation supports blending between physical and keyframe animation very well. It also supports pose matching which help you to switch between physical animation and key frame animation without any glitches. Havok animation SDK provides all of the things you need for combining keyframe animation and ragdoll. However euphoria made the physical contacts intelligent. As far as i know It uses machine learning techniques to control biomechanical forces and make intelligent body collisions.

If you want to make intelligent body contacts you should make a system on top havok physical-keyframe animation blending. If you want to find more about the havok physical animation-keyframe blending, you may search about the "Powered Ragdoll Contoller" and "Rigid Body Ragdoll Controller" on havok animation SDK or havok animation tool.

Euphoria isn't a physics engine. It's a system that drives a physics engine to procedurally generate animations that obey (at least by default) physical laws.

I've seen lots of academic versions published, mostly at SIGGRAPH. We developed our own in-house over the course of several years; it is not an easy problem, as you can imagine. I'm not aware of anything off the shelf, let alone open source, that is able to do any kind of physics driven character movement.

Euphoria is now available "off the shelf": http://www.naturalmotion.com/middleware/euphoria/ It used to be available only as in a co-developer sense (i.e. we would work with developers to integrate our technology in a bespoke way), but since Morpheme 5 it is available as an additional component to the Morpheme animation system http://www.naturalmotion.com/middleware/morpheme/

My information is that Euphoria will only work with PhysX. It can be integrated with other other physics engines (i.e. you would work with developers to integrate your technology in a bespoke way), but this is extremely expensive and time consuming. Is this still true or did this become easier recently?