Introduction to Physical Simulation Project Starter Code

Preamble

We are going to use the same monolithic git repository to development all your physical simulation code, and the following instructions applies to all your projects.

General Build Instruction

This is a standard cmake project, with a few bundled git modules. To build this project, run:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/xinyazhang/psim_starter_code psim
cd psim
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j `nproc`

These commands will clone the git repo into psim/ directory, and build the code inside psim/build/ directory. The compiled the code can be found at psim/bin.

Afterwards, you can run ./goo1.py under the psim/bin directory. Note: this script must be run at psim/bin, otherwise it cannot find the compiled module.

Goo1 Project Instructions

Test your build

change directory to psim/bin/, and run ./goo1.py for your implementation. and ./reference_goo1.py for the reference implementation.

bin/reference contains the reference solution.

In addition, bin/demo_test_goo1.py demonstrates how to run the simulation without GUI. Therefore you can test your code on Lab machines remotely.

Quick start to write your simulation code

The starter code contains all essential code for visualization. All you need to do is to fill up the // TODO sections inside lib/core/goo1/GooCore.cpp and its header file lib/core/goo1/GooCore.cpp.

Goo2 Project Instructions

Update your source code to goo2

git pull --rebase will add goo2 starter code to your project. Be aware you might need to commit changes to your local git repository.

Development

The development instructions are similar to Project Goo1 , except for the goo1 have to be replaced with goo2.

Brief introduction to the code structure

This repository organizes the source code in the following manner:

• lib/core/<project name>: core physical simulation code
• lib/vis/<project name>: visualization of the current physical system, with libigl
• lib/python/<project name>: python binding code with pybind11
• src/<project name>: Python code to invoke the built module
• third-party/: git submodules
• bundle/: bundled projects with does not have a git repo.

A Few Grading Criteria

• Unless you are claiming extra credits for improvements of your GUI, we are NOT going to evaluate your GUI.
• During the evaluation, we are not going to build the GUI code inside the python module. In other words, your simulation code should build and run well with cmake -DPSIM_ENABLE_VISUALIZER=OFF.
  • This option can be toggled with (cd build; ccmake .)