Physically-Based Modeling for Computer Graphics : A Structured Approach

Rating:
Summary: Lots of interesting ideas and concepts, but hard to read
Review: The ideas described in this book should be described in a much shorter and more coherent form. Neither computer graphics people nor physicists nor engineers are used to reading books of this type and therefore I fear that most book bought will never really be read.

Rating:
Summary: Rigorous and complete
Review: This book is a complete and rigorous description of how to build a software library for computing the 3-dimensional motion of solid objects. It uses a unified mechanism for describing objects and the constraints between them. The book is very dense and the language is formal; don't expect it to be a quick read. On the other hand, if you have the kind of interest in this subject that is appropriate for this book, you can get a lot out of it. As a software developer, I was very impressed with the cleanliness and organization of the components of the library.

If you are interested more in the concepts than in the details of an implementation, read a more general physics book with a good chapter or two on dynamics. For a detailed study, try 'Computational Dynamics' by Ahmed A Shabana.

...