In this article, I will introduce the reader to the Physics system used in the Unity game engine. First, I will introduce the Physic Material Asset that is used to define physics properties for collider surfaces. I will also introduce Colliders and talk about the different kinds of Collider types you can create. The Rigidbody component is absolutely essential for performing physics simulations on GameObjects. I will show you how you can create a Rigidbody GameObject that can be user controlled. I will also talk about the Character Controller component that is provided by Unity to control upright characters. And finally, I will introduce the different Joints that are available in Unity.
In the previous article titled Introduction to Unity 3.5 I introduced the Unity interface and we created a simple project that shows a rotating cube. In this article, I want to introduce some basic Unity concepts such as the Asset pipeline and the GameObject-Component model and introduce a few of the Components that Unity provides. I will not go into too much detail about the different components in this article (I will dedicate a different article for each of the more complex components such as Terrain, Particle Effects, Physics, Audio, and Scripts).