What is Carbon?

Numerion Software’s “Carbon” is a position-based dynamics solver for virtual simulation.

It provides a unified physics frame-work supporting the simulation of Soft and Rigid bodies with collision and motion constraints (such as Joints and Servos) in a single pass, allowing full action and reaction between all elements.

Carbon utilizes a proprietary, novel algorithmic approach to deliver massive multi-core, multi-cpu performance on a desktop/workstation and cloud servers, through a number of techniques including minimizing memory bandwidth and leveraging nested parallelism. There is also full control of the trade-off between quality and performance, making Carbon well suited to applications with simulation requirements ranging from real-time to interactive and Hero production.

 

Numerion Software was founded in November 2009 by a small specialist team that originated the physics technology at Criterion Software, used internally by Electronic Arts in games such as Fight Night, FIFA, SKATE, NFS etc. on PC, Mac, PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii.

Thus the Carbon technology is being developed and maintained by a proven team which is highly experienced in cross-platform implementation of high-performance physics.

Since 2009 Carbon has been in continuous research and development and has gone through major improvements in both the core and the tool libraries during the last few years. This R&D is continuing with new features and tools being released on a regular basis.

Key Features

  • Proprietary position-based solver
  • Fully deterministic
  • Unified multi-physics solver: Soft bodies (Cloth and Tissue [tets]), Rigid bodies, Joints, Servos interact/collide seamlessly within your simulation.
  • Fully scriptable
  • Available as ready built Plug-ins and C++ library
  • CPU only - We are yet to see a faster, general purpose, high quality dynamics library on GPUs!
    • Optimized for modern multi-core CPUs
    • Efficient - Only uses as many cores as required
  • Soft body simulation is at the core of Carbon technology - rather than Soft body being a bolt on.
  • Advanced collision algorithms
    • Native support for non-convex meshes
    • Full performance without pre-processing of authored geometry
    • Full self-collision for Soft bodies
  • Sophisticated internal architecture allowing for very advanced dynamics applications
  • Non-linear constraint solver to deliver a robustness not typically found in performant systems
  • Support for high-frequency inputs and outputs (which is required for haptics, where you would typically run and interact with the solver at a frequency of 1000 Hz)
  • Users can choose the trade-off between quality and performance
  • Available for Windows and Linux
  • Active ongoing development and maintenance by a longstanding and committed team