Bullet engine-cuda

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Hi, someone knows if is posible to use CUDA to improve physics calculations on BULLET ENGINE, to get use of graphic process?

2

If Nvidia uses CUDA for PhysX… I understand that bullet could use it.

3

Bullet 3 was supposed to have OpenCL built in as a core concept, which allows you to execute it on the GPU. It was developed for some time and got pushed back for quite a while and I have read that it was picked up again. However, it is not production ready.

4

I was thinking on giving use of the motherboard GPU, that is usually a lot of unused powerprocess capacity, and could be far enougth for physic calculations, that was the idea.

5

The idea is good and that’s why Nvidia is using CUDA and that’s why in Bullet they started to implement an OpenCL solution. Like that, Bullet would be executed on the GPU, just like PhysX. There is one little issue. It takes years to develop something like this to reach a production ready state.
Since Bullet is open source and no one is currently pushing hard to bring the OpenCL solution forward as far as I have seen, we can’t expect anything in the foreseeable future.

6

There is any other gpu based physics engine abailable for use in Blender? I think that the use of physics on 3D could have a lot of improvement space. Today is mainly used for simulations, but a more intensive use of it on animation technics, and even on modelling and texturing is imaginable.
(for example, the use of particle driven brushes on substance painter)

7

There are indeed a lot of applications for physics and it would be even more practical to use when the computations take place on a GPU.
Ton has presented the idea of the “Interactive Mode” quite some time ago, where the game engine would be integrated more tightly into the core of Blender, such that e.g. the physics, but also the logic from the game engine could easily be used in the viewport. This would allow applications like the one you mentioned more easily. Even if the timeframe for this is rather uncertain at this point, the developers are aware of the value it seems.