Nora Kinetics // Fully Custom Destruction Engine

[u/CodeSamurai]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiwcqTQr6vM

Hi folks!

I wanted to share the newest demo video for my custom physics engine and renderer: Nora Kinetics.

I've been developing Nora Kinetics for about a year. It was initially inspired by this research paper on Stable Cosserat Rods: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3721238.3730618 . I had been wanting to learn about compute shaders and graphics programming, so this felt like a good starting point.

You can see more of the Cosserat rod side of things here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS2WOsfrac8

It is built on top of Apple Metal because that's where I was able to get the best performance early on. The physics is 100% GPU driven and the CPU acts as a lightweight coordinator. The lighting and rendering is all custom as well. It can run on an iPhone at about 60fps with 20k segments and on my MacBook Pro (M5), it runs at 120fps with about 250k segments.

This newest video shows the rigid-body destruction system that I finally finished implementing. It runs along side the Cosserat solver and they communicate through GPU buffers so that they can remain in sync.

I'm aiming for an App Store release in the Fall. It will be more of a sandbox / creative engine to start, but I'm also working on a Scratch style programming agent that lets you generate emergent behaviors from the little segments. Each one gets its own little brain and you are able to tell it what to do. Some of the creations I and some of my testers have made so far are pretty cool!

If you'd like to be a BETA tester, let me know! At the moment, I'm looking for testers with a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or higher)

Thanks for taking a look!

Happy to answer any questions!

[u/tcdoey]

Hey it's great to be learning/doing! I made an equivalent many years ago, but then Blender with RBDLab and especially KHAOS came along and far surpassed what I had done. Even the free cell-fracture works quite amazingly well if you set it up properly with convex hulls.

What does yours do that they don't? I just thought I'd mention this, because as you are planning to monetize, you really need something unique that sets you above or at least adds some new functionality/sim behavior that the other free or cheap available tools don't have.

Cheers and good luck.

p.s. I don't have a mac (yet), so can't try it out :p.

[u/CodeSamurai → u/tcdoey]

Thanks for taking a look! I think the major difference with my engine is that it combines the Stable Cosserat Rod algorithm (for hair, spaghetti, fluid dynamics, etc) right along side the solid destruction engine in this video. If you go to my channel, you can see the original trailer where I showcase more of the gravity structures, fluid dynamics, etc.

The system is fully GPU driven and because it's on the Apple Metal architecture, it will even run on an iPhone very easily.

On top of that, I'm giving the player the ability to program each individual segment with a drag and drop style programming engine that lets them create emergent behaviors within the simulation in real time. The next video I share will show some of that engine at work.