The Physics Helper for Blend and Silverlight contains several user controls which allow you to draw objects in Expression Blend 2, and have those objects translated directly into Physics objects using the Farseer Physics Engine. This can be a great timesaver for creating games, as it is traditionally difficult to line up underlying physics bodies and geometries with your Blend artwork.

Intro Video

Watch this short video to see how easy it can be to design physics using Blend 2, Silverlight, and the Physics Helper controls:

LAUNCH VIDEO (please give the video a few moments to display)

Download

PhysicsHelper is now on CODEPLEX!

Download from Codeplex (includes source and demos below)

Enter Feedback/Discuss on Codeplex

Demos

These demos were created with minimal or no coding using the Physics Helper (click images to launch demos):

What's New in Beta 1

1. The algorithm to determine UIElement boundaries is greatly improved (based on Johnathan Porter's boundary detection algorithm he introduced in Physics2D.NET)

2. You can now nest PhysicsJoint controls inside UserControls. This is very handy for creating game characters that need joints for arms, legs, etc. Just be sure to (a) use a Canvas layout inside your UserControl, and (b) give you UserControl a name when placing it into your main Canvas. See the RagDoll Demo for an example of this.

3. The PhysicsController now has a MousePickEnabled property which automatically allows manipulation of objects with the mouse. This is handy for testing/debugging your creations.

4. Various other API changes and improvements

Known Issues

1. Dynamically adding objects through code isn't as clean as I'd like (see the RagDoll demo code for an example of dynamic adding). The issue is that UI elements need to be drawn to the visible screen before their boundary can be determined. So the temporary hack is to have a timer to "wait" for the element to be displayed.

2.  If you rotate or otherwise transform an object in Blend, the object will lose that rotation when running, and the Boundary determination will be incorrect.

3. As always, there is room for refactoring and redesign, but you can surely do some fun things with Beta 1 :)

What's Coming

UPDATE 10/18/2008: Physics Helper is now available on Codeplex! You can submit feeback and enter discussions on the Codeplex forum. If you would like to contribute to this project and are familiar with Farseer, Blend, and Silverlight, please let me know!