Physics and Physical Behaviors

In the real world, objects behave in predictable ways because of their physical properties. These attributes include the mass of the object, its center of gravity, the friction its materials generate when interacting with other objects, the heat it absorbs and emits, how it reflects light and sound waves and much more. It’s this complex relationship of multiple factors that need to be combined in order to understand the behavior.

Why is this important for SimReady?

Being able to simulate these behaviors accurately have important, real-world implications. As an example, take a warehouse that is full of shelves that are each filled with boxes, and one shelving unit is knocked over accidentally. How can the likely extent of damage to a facility be determined and how could it be prevented? There are lots of questions to answer on something like this. What are the contents within each of those boxes and how will their center of gravity and mass influence the response to that sort of action? Is the shelving modular or a single large, rigid structure? Is it possible to minimize damage by putting boxes of a certain mass only on lower shelves or is it better to change shelving locations relative to one another?

These are the kinds of questions that SimReady 3D assets can help answer. If you use Omniverse as your simulation platform, SimReady 3D assets include existing support for realistic physical simulation using the USDPhysics schema which can be leveraged by the built-in physics tools, and these help provide accurate output for users who want to create physically-based scenarios.

It is important to state that SimReady 3D assets are set up using baseline OpenUSD rigid-body physics so that they can be inserted into any simulation platform that supports the USDPhysics API Schema and it is up to the simulation user to determine how they want them to interact with other elements in their runtime. This also means that the SimReady models come with physically based materials so that the simulator understands the object’s mass and center of gravity.

It’s important to note that all SimReady models adhere to meter scale for physics.