voxcraft-sim

A GPU accelerated voxel-based physics engine.

Documentation: https://voxcraft.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

More information: https://voxcraft.github.io/design

Installation

Docker (recommended)

Requirements

When building voxcraft-sim the makefile checks if a GPU is available. Thus it is necessary for docker build to be able to see your GPU. To that end install and configure the nvidia-container-runtime.

Installing nvidia runtime

distribution=$(. /etc/os-release;echo $ID$VERSION_ID) \
   && curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-docker/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add - \
   && curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-docker/$distribution/nvidia-docker.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nvidia-docker.list
   
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y nvidia-docker2
sudo systemctl restart docker

Build

cd voxcraft-sim
docker build -t voxcraft-sim .

Run

docker run -it --gpus all voxcraft-sim

Google Colab

Google Colab provides a free online GPU environment.

Create a new notebook and go to Menu->Runtime->Change runtime type, select GPU.

Then, run the script:

!git clone https://github.com/voxcraft/voxcraft-sim.git; cd voxcraft-sim/;

print("Source code downloaded.")

!cd voxcraft-sim; rm build -rf; mkdir build; cd build; cmake ..; make -j 10;

print("Executables built.")

!cd voxcraft-sim/build; ./voxcraft-sim -i ../demos/basic/ -o output.xml -f > ../../a.history

print("Simulation done.")

!ls

from google.colab import files
files.download('a.history')

Here is a readonly example notebook

Local install

The most difficult part of compiling this project from scratch is installing the CUDA environment. First, make sure you have NVidia Graphic Cards, then download CUDA 10.1 and install it.

Once you have the CUDA 10.1 environment, the rest is easy:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y git cmake libboost-all-dev

git clone https://github.com/voxcraft/voxcraft-sim.git
cd voxcraft-sim
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make -j 10

Notes

Building been tested on a CMAKE versions 3.12 and newer.
Versions of boost known to work: 1.65.1 and 1.67.0

Now you will have two executables: voxcraft-sim and vx3_node_worker. Copy them to your environment and the simulation is ready to use.

Try one of the demos:

./voxcraft-sim -i ../demos/basic/ > demo_basic.history

It will produce a demo_basic.history file that is for voxcraft-viz to visualize.

Citation

If you need to cite our work, here is the format:

@MISC{liu_voxcraft_2020,
	title = {Voxcraft-sim, a GPU-accelerated voxel-based physics engine},
	url = {https://github.com/voxcraft/voxcraft-sim},
	howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/voxcraft/voxcraft-sim}},
	author = {Sida Liu and David Matthews and Sam Kriegman and Josh Bongard},
	year = {2020}
	doi = {10.5281/zenodo.3835152},
}

voxcraft / voxcraft-sim