I need every single ball to go into a pocket in one hit. How can I do that without arduously going through every ball’s timeline and animating it by hand? And blender’s rigid body physics is hardly integrated in a way you can actually use in animation yet (I really think it belongs with soft body and cloth sim rather than recording the game engine).
I would recomend making a curve path for each ball and then adjusting the speed accordingly to keep them from passing through each other and make it more natural. Basically fake physics on the whole thing.
Or you could break it using the game engine, and then right after they break take over manually and finish the ipo curves by hand to get them in the holes.
Perhaps it’s easier to do an inverse animation (IIRC you can reverse time using composite nodes)? Make the balls appear in the holes, bounce back and forth, to finally gather nicely in the middle? Not sure, just a suggestion.
why not animating by hand?
doing this with physics would be so much more work.
when u animate it by hand you have full control over your animation. and this one doesn’t require so much work.
you could also make curve path like corlayantor mentioned, but since the balls are normally not going in curves and just straight lines, i would just make simple keyframe animation
how do you upload GIF files for your posts? I tried it one time and it says invalid Format:(
I would recommend also finding a Youtube video where all or most of the balls go in, and base the animation off real video. Should help your timing a lot. And give you a more realistic direction on the balls.