The Unity model here is of a Lennard Jones potential applied to particles in a periodic box.

Additional Authors: Jessica Bernard, Gerardo Rodriguez, Suneth Tissera, Melissa Yataco, Matt Niepielko

Additional Authors: Xyler Ferraris

So, I was looking at a task I’ve done before in Unity today but that is always a little tricky – creating C/C++ code as a DLL that then gets imported into Unity.

Conway’s Game of Life (see Wikipedia entry) is a classic problem for computer science students, and provides an early example of cellular automata as well as an opportunity to practice nested loops and multi-dimensional arrays. (Javascript example from Shodor.org) . For larger grids, it can also be an opportunity for students to think about domain decomposition and parallelism. (HPC version with parallel code) .

The Unity Visualization Toolkit is a collection of tools for performing 3D visualization in a Unity scene.

As you want to view the visualizations you create, you will want to be able to change perspective and move through your scenes in game.

This model will extend from our previous example using TimestepModel. We will build a class that uses a threaded update method, like before, and will use that update method to integrate forward a system of orindary differential equations.

The fundamental dynamic in any GUI driven simulation is the interplay between the GUI and the simulation. The communication between the two can create problems in your application when the timing of the two doesn’t line up.

One of the most common tasks in modeling and simulation is the integration of a system of ODEs.

This is a departure from the current set of posts on adding modeling and simulation to Unity game engine. In Unity, I’ve got great built in animation and visualization and have to add my own numerical analysis. In my Intro to Scientific Programming class (first year Java for computational science majors) I have the opposite problem, good tools for handling the math, but not as many options as I’d like for visualization.

One of the most important features of Unity’s scripting language is the “GetComponent” command. Each game object in Unity has its features extended by components. Components can be used to attach a renderer, or a collider, or a special effect. Components can also be used to attach our custom scripts.

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts about my experiences using Unity as a modeling and visualization tool. This will cover a “hello world” style program for modeling in Unity, and will introduce the reader to creating a program in the unity interface, adding a game object to the scene, and using a script to control the game object’s position.

Hi! This blog will detail my experiences with using assorted computational tools in the classroom, in particular (but not limited to) using Unity game engine as a modeling and visualization tool, particularly in informal ed and outreach settings.