1 Overview

ArtiSynth is an open-source Java-based platform that supports combined multibody/FEM modeling in an interactive simulation environment. Users may build their own models using Java code, or load preexisting models from either files or Java classes. This document describes how to install and run ArtiSynth on MacOS machines.

ArtiSynth’s prerequisites are listed in Section 2. A Java JDK must be installed on your system; information on this is given in Section 4.

There are two ways to obtain ArtiSynth:

1. 1.

   Install a precompiled release - the fastest way to quickly install ArtiSynth to try out some of the demo programs. Instructions for this are given in Section 5.

2. 2.

   Install from GitHub - recommended for more serious developers who want to keep their codebase current and easily install new features and bug fixes. When installing from GitHub, you also need to download the runtime libraries, and compile ArtiSynth. GitHub installation instructions are given in Section 6.

Once ArtiSynth is installed, it can be run and various demonstration models can be loaded. Some simple details on this are given in Section 7; complete instructions on running and interacting with models are provided in the ArtiSynth User Interface Guide.

Many users will want to create their own models in Java. This is done by creating Java classes to implement these models, as described in the ArtiSynth Modeling Guide, and then integrating them into ArtiSynth, as described in Section 8. When creating models, users may want to use an integrated development environment (IDE) for editing and compiling their Java code. At present, most of the ArtiSynth community uses the Eclipse IDE (Section 13), but other IDEs such as NetBeans and IntelliJ could be used as well.

Users may also want to install and run external models and projects that have been created either by others or by themselves. In particular, the project artisynth_models contains an open source set of models primarily related to head and neck anatomy. Installation of artisynth_models is discussed in Section 11.

It is also possible to interface ArtiSynth with, or run it under, MATLAB. For information on this, see the guide Interfacing ArtiSynth to MATLAB.