After working with my materials and overall scene I’m needing to work out some kinks in my particle sim before I can prepare for a final render and need some help.
First, I have 2 particle sims and the particles float above the surface of the ground plane that has collision instead of sitting on it.
You have discovered that fact that the particle collision system really does not work.
You must abandon the particle system and use the game physics system instead. The particle system only has one collision detection shape and that shape is a sphere. So rectangular shaped objects like your pills will never lie flat.
The work flow is something like this.
Use your existing scene to populate the area above with particles.
Make sure you set the physics setting on the particle sources before you convert.
Then convert the particle system to mesh so each particle it generated is now a mesh.
Switch to the game engine render mode.
Set the game engine to record the physics into f-curves.
Then press the P-Key and watch all the pills fall.
The physics system supports mesh based detection for collision so you should get a better look than just using particles.
The majority of my particles fall though the floor.
I’ve tried setting the margin up to like .01 with no change. But beyond that I’m lost on what I should do.
It seems to stop about 99% of them when I set the margin up to 1 on the ground plane but then I'm back to the issue of them floating above the surface again.
Okay I decided to just drop the ground plane by 1 unit to get the particles to line up with the rest of the scene baked the animation then moved the ground plane back up 1 unit.
I only used the game physics to do the particles on the ground since I had a problem with a bunch levitating and just deleted all that weren’t on the ground plane and I will us a particle sim to do the ones in the air.
But, to get it to work best I need to set the location of the particles to the ground permanently and delete the key frames to pick out the right frame.
How would I go about applying the location of all the ones on the ground so that the animation of the sim I baked no longer has an effect?
In short how do I lock an object’s position and delete all key frames?
If I understand you right, what you need to do is open up a dopesheet. Then go to the frame where you want the pills to not be affected by the physics sim anymore. Simply box select all the key frames from that point on and delete them. The pills will stop moving and remain at the location/orientation of the keyframe.
Also, I generally fake the floor out like you mention as well.
anyone mind throwing me another rope?