Using Blender for physics simulations

Question

I've been looking at different ways of creating a certain physics simulation. What I am trying to do is to 3D model the motion of a body under the effects of various forces over time. I was originally looking at coding something in c++ using a physics engine (Bullet) and a 3d engine (Irrlicht). However, I noticed that Blender already allows one to do physical simulations since Bullet is integrated with it (correct me if I'm wrong). This seems like it would make it much easier to design the simulation exactly how I want it (with Blender's extensive GUI).

My issue is that I would like to use the results from the simulation (basically x,y,z,pitch,roll,yaw of the body at each timestep) for input into c/c++ code (or another language if its much easier for this). Can this be done with Blender? Is there a better software package for this that I am overlooking? Thanks, any advice is appreciated.

Answer 1

I would use a Python script for that task, as Blender has a nice interface getting/setting the objects and their properties programmatically through .py files.

So after you are done with your animation you can call a script to walk through the frames and save the required data into a file.

A getting started doc can be found here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Extensions/Python or here: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Py/API/Intro

There is a huge list of scripts worth browsing for similar routines you need. http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.5/Py/Scripts

Answer 2

As mentioned before, it would be very easy to use python for this. For more specific use if using Blender, perhaps you should consult the main Blender forum www.blenderartists.org

Blenderartists python support: http://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?11-Python-Support

Blender 2.5 code snippets (Introduction to scripting for Blender 2.5): http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?193908-Code-snippets.-Introduction-to-Python-scripting-in-Blender-2.5x