When the pandemic hit, and the industry ground to a halt, I decided to spend some time learning about Rigid Bodies in Unity.

I was hoping that the new VFX graph could do this super quick on the GPU. However, after a bit of research, I discovered that this was only for particles. As beautiful as the VFX graph can be, rigid bodies are calculated on the CPU.

So I wrote a little script that could instance random rigid body objects (like a particle system), and have the fill up the screen. Combined with some early tests in the HDRP, they simulated and rendered very quickly.

I couldn’t push any raytracing features yet, as this was before the RTX days and my 3090.