Collision Detection, Particle Physics, and ThreeJS

by Henry

2018-11-28

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Hello again, and welcome back to my blog.

Today I am posting about a web app I made which I am calling my ThreeJS Web Simulator. It is my capstone project moved to JavaScript from C# and from Unity to ThreeJS. Visit threejswebsim.henrywowen.com to use it as it is live right now.

Particle physics is a simple type of physics to simulate, mostly involving spheres. The simulation was initially created as an environment to test out collision detection algorithms. The two algorithms that appear in this app are Sweep and Prune and a kind of Uniform Grid Partitioning, which I call Spatial Masking. To read more about these algorithms see my Capstone Page.

ThreeJS operates at a lower level than Unity and requires more work for less. But my needs were pretty simple and it was not difficult to migrate the system over to the new platform. 

A latent feature of this simulator is screen capturing using CCapture.js. This allows a simulation that is unable to perform at 60 fps to be rendered into a series of still frames in a .zip file. This series of stills can be combined into an MP4 using ffmpeg. This feature is not yet available in production but may be coming soon. In the mean time here is a clip produced by this process.

 

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