I was checking some sites absentmindedly and this idea suddenlly came to me; with a few tweaks Blender would be an awesome competitor in the physics sandbox “market” (things like Phun/Algodoo, Rigid Chips/Laputan Blueprints etc).
Mostly it would be things like tweaking GUI customization etc, keeping things commonly used when setting physics experiments etc on hand and so on, but also with additional scripts for making things easier or just simplifying tasks (drawing chains with the grease pencil for example); basicly using Blender as the underlying engine, optimizing the interface for modeling, setting and running (simulated) physics experiments.
I’m not sure i’m explaining this well enough, feel free to ask anything and point out any issues etc.
ps:i’m no where near having enough knowledge and fluency in Blender usage and tweaking to be able to do this myself, this post is about asking if someone has already done it, or if not, throwing ideas out there hoping to inspire people that have the knowledge and skills into making this real.
We haven’t built a computer capable of running a perfectly accurate simulation of the Universe in real time yet, we don’t even know everything necessary to actually program such a simulation (only aproximations that break on certain situations)
That is usually the case with any physics simulation.
Those are interesting, but not really what i’m talking about.
ps: for those that don’t know them:Algodoo and Laputan Blueprints (link to the official sites in the respective video descriptions). Check the related videos for more creations and the previous incarnations (Phun and RigidChips respectively)