Crysis “Mass Physics Engine”

Crysis Mass Physics HD By ÂLÐÒ•Ó from Ald0o0 on Vimeo.

Gaming. It subverts serious, sober scholarship and makes it hip by tapping into my backbrain with good tunes and wild interactive graphics, bypassing my conscious, professional concerns about ethics in research: I don’t want to like it; I just do.

I’ve been flipping through some of the latest entries at Andrew Hudson-Smith’s Digital Urban, and pasting some of the video here at CTlab. The interest, as always, is in the applied spatial research. In this case, the thread is based on the Crysis gaming engine:

The Crysis engine has an inbuilt physics system that supports vehicles, rigid bodies, liquid, rag doll, cloth and soft body effects. The movies in this post provide a glimpse of the physics engine in action, the first clip above demonstrates the ‘Lego’ modification running in real-time.

Andrew’s pulled all sorts of video demos of the system, which are pretty slick, from a Vimeo series. An online tutorial entitled “How to Render High Quality Videos of Destruction” explains it all; catchy digital hellfire and brimstone, that.