An interactive guide to spring-mass simulations, from a single damped oscillator to a playable synthesizer

[u/emezeske]

https://anukari.com/how-it-works

I shared a video about my 3D physics synthesizer here last week. When I get questions about how it works, it's always hard to explain without a diagram or two.

Finally I built this page where I explain how it works from basic principles, and every step of the way I provide a little interactive physics simulation to illustrate the explanation.

This all made me think of the stickied "animation vs simulation" question on this sub. I considered simply having animations to illustrate. But I decided that making the diagrams interactive would make things much easier to /really/ understand. In a way, having each diagram be a full physics simulation lets a reader "ask a question" of the simulation, and get an answer. Animations don't let you ask your own questions!

I tried to keep the explanation as simple as possible, although I plan to continue adding appendices to answer deeper questions (including those that involve math). So any questions you ask here, I will try to answer in a comment, but also might eventually get an even better answer!