Hello
I am struggling with a “simple” particle test that involves a balloon and string animation, supplied thanks to http://matica.com, and a letter shaped cube. My goal is to make many different balloons float, each with different sized twirling envelopes attached to the string.
For the moment, I have a floating balloon, but the string does not react to the turbulence. But that is not too important.
I also have a “envelope” that is a separate object and floats around like a leaf. I have tried parenting the objects and using constraints without success. The reason why the envelope is a different object is because I want to have lots of different styles of envelope, but only a single balloon model.
My real problems are:
1: How do a attach a separate object , the envelope, to the string?
2: How do I get them to interact to wind or turbulence together?
3: How can I “weight” the envelope so that different balloons react differently?
Below is the blender file that I am testing.
I didn’t look at your blend file, I just followed my idea… And here is what I got:
The balloons and the “letters” are rigid bodies. To make it work, since we can’t add buoyancy to objects, I worked in Zero-G. No gravity. I set the weight of everything to be very light by entering very small values directly in the Physics tab. I tuned a bit the damping but I must say that I didn’t obtain as much rotation as I’d like.
The letters are attached to the balloons with a Point rigid body constraint so that they swing freely. I also added a constraint on the balloons to look at the letter hanging below them. I set the strength to only 0.5 to make it more realistic. The balloon will want to stay vertical because of the weight of the string and it will also point its bottom tip toward the letter which drags it backwards. A half strength on a “TrackTo” constraint does all this very simply.
The strings are just Bezier curves. I added hooks to both ends ([CTRL H] in Edit mode) and I parented the hooks. One at the bottom of the balloon and the other one at the top of the letter. The handles are rotated thanks to the hooks which are rotated at the same time than their parent. It just works…
When all this is done, you just need some wind and some turbulences. 2 force fields. Tuning them is a bit tricky I must say. I made the whole scene explode a few times before to achieve anything.
WOW!!! What can I say? Thank you very much indeed. I was not expecting anyone to do it. I will examine very closely what you did as I have so many things to learn from your method. Many thanks.
Christopher
To make it work, since we can’t add buoyancy to objects, I worked in Zero-G. No gravity. I set the weight of everything to be very light by entering very small values directly in the Physics tab. I tuned a bit the damping but I must say that I didn’t obtain as much rotation as I’d like.