Nima development has ceased.

I regretfully announce that Feeling Software has ceased development of Nima due to insufficient commercial interest. We want to thank everyone who used Nima and sent feedback, and we apologize for the inconvenience that this change of plan will have on your projects. We also want to thank AGEIA for their technical and financial contribution to this project. I wish we could have continued supporting their amazing physics engine, but financial reality forces us to focus on projects that are profitable for Feeling Software.

If you are an AGEIA PhysX licensee (directly or indirectly, e.g. through the Emergent Gamebryo engine), please contact the company from which you have licensed your technology to inquire for support. The Nima forums on the Feeling Software web site will soon be closed.

Respectfully,

Christian Laforte
President, Feeling Software

Nima allows Maya artists and developers to author and interactively manipulate complex physical assets including rigid bodies and constraints.

Nima exposes the power and performance of AGEIA's PhysX engine in Maya. AGEIA's PhysX is a Physics engine designed for high performance games and applications, as demonstrated by the large number of game studios who adopted it. The Nima content can also be exported through COLLADA Physics or NxuStream2.

This version covers rigid body dynamics and cloth, including rigid constraints and rag dolls. A free version of Nima is available for download, thanks to AGEIA's continued generosity. A commercial version will also be available soon with additional features designed for professionals such as support for Linux, deformable bodies and more complex rag doll setups. 

Recent improvements

Version 1.01

• Fixed several issues reported by users or found internally, including: angular momentum wasn’t preserved due to incorrect DG evaluation ordering, implemented baking of rotation in bake transform, occasional crash while loading complex scenes (e.g. unit tests 9, 34), unit tests 16-19 didn’t work on older versions of Maya.

• Support for Maya 8.5.

Version 1.0

• Fixed COLLADA export problems.
• Improved stability. Eliminated many crash conditions. Dozens of test scripts have been written to ensure higher code quality. A test shelf has been added to easily run unit tests interactively.
• Added preliminary support for cloth attachment. Note that cloth-cloth collisions are not supported in this public version, but they will soon be supported in PhysX 2.6 and above.
• Added support for moving the rotate pivot and rotate pivot translate in frame 1, e.g. freeze transform. See “Limitation: rewind before freezing transformations or moving pivot” for details.
• Added support for Maya 8.
• Non-convex meshes are supported, but note that two non-convex meshes will not collide. It is recommended that active/dynamic rigid bodies be kept convex for performance and stability.
• Fixed many problems with undo.
• Support for much improved nxuStream2 to export in PhysX and COLLADA formats.
• Initial support (still incomplete) for Continuous Collision Detection (CCD) to prevent tunneling.

• PATCH 1 (October 29th 2006)
  Improved support for CCD. nxTest29 works as expected.
  Fixed penetration problem (e.g. in carcrash) when mass is not 1, due to incorrect inertia tensor.
  Fixed other minor problems.

Known issues

• Due to a Maya API regression in Maya 8.0 and 8.5, cloth doesn't work reliably on these versions. We apologize for the problem and are currently researching a work-around solution.
• An earlier version of the Nima 1.01 installer for Maya 8.5 mistakenly assumed that the default Maya 8.5 installation path is in "Program Files\Alias\Maya" instead of "Program Files\Autodesk\Maya". The issue has been addressed.

Demo movies

Screenshots

NovodexIntegrationInMayaAlphaVisualization.png

Test scenes

Lamp.mb: blending keyframe animation and physics simulation (demo video).



Falling orc: driving skeleton skinning with ragdoll (demo video).