PhysX Planet

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2009-05-29

Creating planetary gravity with a force field was much easier than I was expecting. Especially after finding this thread on the official PhysX forum.
http://developer.nvidia.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3201&pid=9249&st=0&#entry9249

After doing that, I got curious and I removed the sphere "planet" but I kept the gravity force field. As expected, all of the shapes grouped together to form their own planet.

After I kept watching it, the planet started pulsing back and forth and eventually tore itself apart in a vortex that alternated back and forth.

The debris vortex started stabilizing and turned into a spinning ring.

The ring kept expanding and getting bigger and bigger.

I added some more cubes to the center, which formed a cool looking planet with a ring.

The planet at the center eventually started breaking apart and forming a ring as well, but what was most interesting was that the inner ring was rotating in the opposite direction of the outer ring.