Blender Rigid Body Constraints

Support Tutorials, Tips and Tricks
1

Hiya Everybody :slight_smile: (hi Dr nick)

I just thought I’d post on here a couple of my videos that go over the (relatively new) rigid body constraints feature in Blender. If you’ve ever wondered how to use them or how they can be useful then hopefully these videos will point you in the right direction :smiley:

This first video is specific to the Generic Spring constraint and goes over how to use it to make a physically reactive piston platform:

https://youtu.be/B6-UWgMoiHI

And this second video just is a quick run down of what the other constraints actually do and how to make a simple cog system all driven by one motor constraint:

https://youtu.be/bS78i9U2w6s

Hopefully they’re helpful to some of you out there and as always if you have any questions about the videos (or anything else Blender related) then feel free to email me ([email protected]) or comment on one of the videos.

Thanks for your time, thanks for watching, and good luck with your Blenderations :smiley:

Jamie

2

Thx 4 sharing, really useful :slight_smile:

3

Thanks for the feedback, I’m glad it helped :slight_smile:

4

I’m trying to follow the first tutorial using the spring constraint, but when I get to the point @16:49 where the spring is adjusted in the drivers properties panel, I don’t have those options available. In the video I can see that a Generattoe modifier has somehow been applied, but when I try to add one it’s faded out and doesn’t have any effect.

Any help in how to get the spring back in shape after setting it’s driver type to Averaged Value?

5

Hi Anthony :slight_smile:

I’m not exactly sure why the add modifier button is greyed out, no matter what I do, I can’t get it to do the same for me. However, we can do something else to work around it.

Where you changed the driver type to ‘Averaged Value’, go back and change it to ‘Scripted Expression’, and then a little box should appear beneath it called ‘Expr:’ that you can type in. In here, we’re going to write the ‘sum’ that we were going to ‘generate’ if everything was working as it should be. So how it translates is, if we set the generate modifier to be 0.00 + 0.255x, instead in our ‘expr’ box, we would type “0.00 + 0.255*var”, without the quotation marks. (There may or may not be a little error beneath this box that says, “ERROR: Python auto-execution disabled”. To fix this, head to your user preferences, then under the File tab, enable 'Auto Run Python Scripts.)

That should hopefully give you the same desired effect. If that doesn’t work, then something is iffy with your other driver settings and you’ll have to send your blend file to me to have a look at. You can use http://www.pasteall.org/blend/ for that, but hopefully you won’t need it.

6

Hey, thanks for responding so quickly! I did what you said and all is working properly now. Big thanks. :smiley: