New Open-Source Physics Engine For Blender Released

Check out ZOZO's Contact Solver for achieving penetration-free simulation.

You might remember Ryoichi Ando's paper on a new method for physics-based simulations, which gained attention last autumn.

Ryoichi Ando is a Simulation Engineer at ZOZO, a Japanese fashion and technology corporation. As part of his work, he maintains an open-source physics solver called ZOZO's Contact Solver. Together with ZOZO, he has now released a Blender 5.0 add-on, bringing the company's contact-rich deformable simulation technology to Blender users.

In particular, it supports:

Finite Element deformable simulation with penetration-free contacts;
Strictly strain-limited cloth that does not stretch like rubber;
Local or remote execution on Windows and Linux;
macOS support via a remote solver engine;
Cloud GPU workflows, such as vast.ai or AWS;
MCP-based tool exposure, allowing an LLM to set up simulations.

ZOZO

The whole stack is open-source, including both the Blender add-on and the simulator engine. The project is released under the Apache 2.0 license, so it can be studied, modified, and used in commercial proprietary code, as long as you comply with the license.

Ryoichi Ando pointed out that the add-on isn't intended as a drop-in replacement for existing tools:

"It's slow, the UI still involves many manual steps, and there are still rough edges. We run many automated tests, but they cannot cover everything, and the simulator may still stall in difficult cases.

The documentation may also sound a bit LLM-spoken, though we explain how LLMs are used. I also prepared tutorial videos and demos to help people get started. Some of the tutorials were recorded in one take with minimal preparation, so they may be rough around the edges, but I hope they are still useful."

The developer also noted that Blender add-on development is not his primary role at the company, and he welcomes any feedback. If the project receives enough attention from the community, he may be given more opportunities to continue working on it in the future.

Check out ZOZO's Contact Solver here and share your thoughts with Ryoichi Ando here.

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