I’m trying to make a pendulum animation for a physics class, in which a ball is suspended from a simple rope (or a metal bar). The rope is fixed from the top, and the ball is at the other end, swinging back and forth according to the laws of physics (i.e., slowest at the highest positions, fastest when it’s at equilibrium position), until the ball breaks off from the rope and flies off. The catch is, it has to fly off in the wrong direction (i.e., not along the tangent to the curve).
I’ve been beating around with this for a couple days now with little to no luck…
Help? [It would be amazing if someone could make a rough functional sketch of this file, just so I could snoop around and compare with what I’ve been doing, but a simple written answer is also helpful as well ]
On layer 1: A passive rigid body cube to act as the pivot point; an active rigid body sphere to act as the pendulum mass, and an empty to act as the rigid body constraint (point) that links them together.
On layer 2: The stuff you’d want to show in the animation. A sphere with a copy-transforms constraint linking it to the pendulum-mass sphere on layer 1 (so it moves in exactly the same way) and a cylinder with the same thing done to it so it looks like a rope and pivots like one.
At a certain time, the copy-transforms constraint on the layer 2 sphere has its influence brought down to zero, and the manual animation takes over, making the layer 2 sphere move in a direction that it really wouldn’t.
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