Simulation Preferences

To display: Choose File Preferences from the main menu and click Simulation or its icon.

Rigid Body Dynamics Engine

Sets the dynamics engine to be used for simulating rigid bodies. The dynamics engine is set per simulation environment, so you could have different engines for different environments within the same scene.

For more information, see Choosing a Dynamics Engine [ Simulation].

PhysX (the default) is generally more stable and faster than ODE, especially for scenes with many rigid bodies, or with actual shape collisions.
ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) is the rigid body dynamics engine used by previous versions of Softimage. It is an open source library for simulating rigid body dynamics, allowing you to write your own features for it.

See Choosing a Dynamics Engine [ Simulation] for more information.

Update Current Environment

Apply Now

Click this button to convert the dynamics engine of the existing environment to the engine you have selected from the Rigid Body Dynamics Engine list.

If you don't click this button after switching dynamics engines, the new engine is used only for the next environment that you create. This allows you to have a different dynamics engine for each environment in a scene.

The name of the current engine is displayed for the dynamics operator in the simulation environment in the explorer.

See The Simulation Environment [ Simulation] for more information.

File Cache Path Templates

Sets the default paths, file name syntax, and cache file format for cache files that are created in:

The Cache Manager — Cache Manager [Properties Reference].
The Cache on File node in the ICE tree — see Cache on File [ICE Reference])
The Simulation Time Control property editor — see Simulation Time Control Property Editor [Properties Reference].
Note
- These preferences are saved with the scene, so if you change them in your current scene, you won't see their effect until you create a new scene.
- For a list of the tokens you can use in the file name and path templates, see Tokens and Templates [Data Management]. You can use any of the Universal tokens described there, in addition to the Caching tokens.

File Name	The default name of the cache file you want to create. This is the syntax: [object]_[version]_[frame] To add frame padding to the frame numbers, see the description for the [Frame] token in Tokens and Templates [Data Management] for more information.
Cache Type	The default file format used for the cache file: ICECache (.icecache) nCache (.xml) PointCache2 (.pc2) Custom See Cache File Formats [Data Management] for more information.
Default Path	The folder path that you want to set as the default for saving cache files. This can be the Project Path, Temporary Path, or any of the Paths A/B/C that you have defined below.
Project Path	The path to your current project or the default project. A Simulation/[model]/[object] folder is added to the [project path] root in which the cache files are stored.
Temporary Path	A temporary path you want to use for quick caching, such as C:\temp. This is set to your Softimage user path as defined by the XSI_USERHOME environment variable, with a [project path]/Simulation/[scene]/[model]/[object] folder added.
Path A/B/C	Separate, definable paths that you can use for different purposes, such as a path to somewhere on your local computer, to a network drive, etc. If you want to make the cache file available to other computers on the network, make sure to add a [scene] variable in the path, such as in [project path]/Simulation/[scene]/[model]/[object].