This section provides articles to help the community starting using SOFA and developing interactive applications.

• Getting Started: instructions about building and installing SOFA.
• Main Principles: everything you need to know about what is SOFA and how it works.
• Video Tutorials: list videos helping new users starting with SOFA.
• Using SOFA: how to use SOFA to build and run simulation scenes (user documentation).
• Programming with SOFA: how to write your own code and then contribute it to SOFA (developer documentation).

Feel free to leverage the SOFA Discussions forum to elaborate on your queries. The supportive SOFA community is eager to offer assistance and guidance.

Before crafting your own code, explore the SOFA plugin list. You might just find exactly what you are searching for!

Detailed introductions about SOFA and SOFA in soft-robotics were written:

• SOFA Framework: SOFA: A Multi-Model Framework for Interactive Physical Simulation. F. Faure et al. Soft Tissue Biomechanical Modeling for Computer Assisted Surgery, 2012 [BibTex]
• SoftRobot: Software toolkit for modeling, simulation and control of soft robots. E. Coevoet et al. Advanced Robotics, 2017 [BibTex]

Everyone is very welcome to contribute to this documentation. This can be done by pull-requesting changes on the documentation GitHub repository or by reporting any missing information so that this documentation may constantly improve!

Files are written in Markdown. If you don't understand the syntax, you can refer to this useful cheatsheet.