Tuesday, March 31st, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

Download Nvidia’s bizarre new PhysX FleX demo


Nvidia’s FleX demo, in a video produced by PhysXInfo.com. The GPU-based multiphysics system represents any object as a system of particles linked by constraints, enabling different material types to interact organically.

Nvidia has released a neat new demo of PhysX FleX, its GPU-accelerated particle-based multiphysics system, showing materials ranging from rigid and semi-rigid bodies to cloth and viscous fluids interacting in real time.

Its release coincides with the completion of “basic integration” of the solver into Unreal Engine 4.

Fire bananas at flags, pour goop on armadillos and melt bunnies
The demo has actually been available since at least mid-March – and Nvidia has been showing parts of it in live presentations since 2013 – but it’s recently been getting a lot of coverage on gaming channels.

Largely, that’s down to the weird assortment of physics objects it throws around, which range from building blocks to bananas, bunnies, armadillos, confetti, cloth, noodles and unidentifiable green goop.

However, there’s serious physics behind it: FleX represents any object as a system of particles connected by constraints, permitting the different material types to interact organically.

The developer overview compares it to offline tools like Softimage’s Lagoa or Maya’s nCloth, and while it doesn’t really have the resolution of either, it’s pretty impressive for something running in real time.

Availability
If you want to try FleX itself, you’ll need to delve into the code. You can find instructions for downloading the source for the base UE4 implementation from GitHub in this post on PhysXInfo.com.

According to the same story, the standalone FleX SDK can be requested from Nvidia directly, and the FleX solver will form part of the upcoming PhysX SDK 3.4.

However, if you just want to melt bunnies, the download link for the demo is at the foot of the story. As you’d expect, you’ll need a fairly powerful GPU to run it.

Read more about FleX on Nvidia’s developer site

Download the FleX 0.25 demo from MediaFire