Hello Everyone,

I am kind of in a rock and a hardplace really at the moment. First and formost I think I should better explain what I am looking for and state that I really do not have the time to build this myself due to not really knowing the fine detail of putting together a basic rendering engine and not even having any experience in the D3D/OpenGL world so I am looking for an alternative.

I am working on a project which needs to be simulated. This is not a game project. Essentially I need to take a 3D model which has basic animations and I need to put it into a rendering engine. Once in the engine I need to be able to apply weights, directional, and thrust values to various peices of the model. Then I need to simulate various actions through some sort of scripting system.

Sorry the requirements are kind of specific but think of it like this. Say I need to simulate a rocket. I would need to be able to place the rocket in a scene and apply a weight value to it. Then I would need to apply thrust values to the engine and maybe environmental factors like wind speed and direction so I can simulate then observe and collect various peices of data like flight trajectory, height, speed, etc....

Anyone know of any engines out there which can be easily scripted or modefied to set this sort of stuff up? I can't really find any software out there as I do not quite know what to search for. So I figured I would ask the wonderful people here.

Have you checked the common engine candidates: udk & unity, atleast udk should use a physics engine which should be able to handle basic rigidbody physics.

Although check bullet which have some ready to use opengl demos, thought the rendering quality is really low. It depends on your needs.

I am sure the UDK should be able to do what I want in theory but is actually a very complex program to learn by the looks of it due to UnrealScript and all that other features I would have to weed through. It could be feasible I would think if I can get blender imports to work. Unity is probably the easier option but the biggest problem I see could be in the actual physics. I am sure it can handle rigidbody but I do not know if I can get the wind forces that would be used for cloth physics to operate on rigidbody. I never used any of these engines so I really have no idea. Out of all of them I think the UDK may be the most capable due to all of the features. After all for non commercial work you are getting the whole UnrealEngine at no cost. As for the data logging I am not sure if UnrealScript can datalog but it might be able to write a C++ dll to do the logging if that is allowed with the free UDK. It would be nice if there was something a bit less then a full fleged game engine but it might be my only choice unless I find a way to go custom. I might have to look at JMonkeyEngine as well.

Oh wow totally forgot about that plus it uses python that might work I will have to tinker with that first thanks for the reminder.

I used SolidWorks in college, but it is an engineering program.

Yea there is no way in hell I would ever be able to afford all the appropriate solidworks software to do a hobby project simulation like this. One of the main reasons I desided to look at the game engine direction. This is technically more of an engineering project and if I can get by with something free instead of rediculously priced engineering software for the rough simulations I need I will Thanks for the solid recommendation however.