Hey guys. I want to make a quick animation of something completely random. The only thing I don’t know how to accomplish is making a large plane of glass react to a few spheres falling onto it. I can’t set the glass to a rigid body because then there would be absolutely no distortion of the glass. My first guess would be to set the glass to a soft body but I know so little about soft body that getting the settings perfect would be impossible. Suggestions?
I’m not sure what kind of distortion you’re looking for. Glass usually doesn’t deform much without breaking, unless you just want it to vibrate, or you’re doing some sort of super-duper slow-motion thing. Can you elaborate, possibly with a video of the real life behavior you’re trying to emulate?
Well, in the scene I want to create, the camera will be up really close to the glass, the only light source will be quite dark and focused on the glass, and the glass plane will be much larger than the sphere. If a sphere fell onto that plane of glass, the glass would very visibly distort without breaking. The animation I want to make doesn’t really need to have the glass distort. The distortions would just make the scene more entertaining and realistic. And PS: I don’t think I have a video of glass distorting. I bet there are loads of videos on YouTube though.
But no way for me to know if the video I happen to find is actually what you’re thinking of. How about you find one to use as an example so I don’t have to waste an hour trying to figure out what search terms will show me the image in your imagination?
I seriously doubt that I could find a video of glass distorting how I imagine it. You and I both know that glass can bend but not far before breaking. There has to be some soft body preset that accomplishes that.
Preset? No. But there’s probably a setting that could be made for it. If only we had some idea of how far it can bend and what that looks like.
I mean, you can pretty easily imagine glass bending far enough to the point where it looks like glass and not some weird transparent rubber. Ill play around with the soft body settings some more and see how close I can get.
I dunno, I kind of bet that vibrations from an impact wobble through glass like a wave, in which case you may be better off using dynamic paint than soft bodies.
The only problem with that is I have never used Dynamic Paint before. I’ll watch a few tutorials and see what I can learn…
Alright. I know how to use Dynamic Paint now and its a fun tool to use. The only problem is that I seriously doubt that getting the waves to act like glass is going to be possible. The simple options you have to change the waves in Dynamic Paint don’t seem to be enough control over what happens on that plane.
I still don’t know what exactly you think happens over a plane of glass. Every video I’ve been able to find just shows a little bit of wobbling as it fractures, but no wobbling without shattering. That could be accomplished by using fracture tools and rigid body physics, then adding a bit of noise to the location curves of the pieces. As I said a while ago, I can’t tell you how to do something I can’t picture. If you can find me a video of the behavior you’re imagining, maybe I can suggest something. Until then, I think the reason you can’t get realistic results is that you’re imagining something unrealistic and trying to simulate it using real physics rules. The only other thing I can think of is that you could just take whatever “transparent rubber” soft body settings you’ve come up with and slow the animation down.
This is where telepathy would come in handy. If I can’t get the plane to just distort a little without breaking, then, in my animation, you wouldn’t see any distortions at all. Anyways, I appreciate the help!
Well, you can get the plane to do whatever you want. Your softbody settings might even work if tweaked a bit, but I don’t know what they are either. Those could be shared without telepathy.
Ill have to play around with the settings some more. But, now that I think about it more, with the size of the plane I want to use, there wouldn’t be much distortion at all. But I still can easily imagine how it would look on a large pane of glass…
Like I said, every video I can find that shows any distortion shows just a little bit of a bend followed by the glass shattering. I don’t know if what you’re imagining actually happens in real life.
It depends on the size of the plane of glass. There is a very large window in my front room and when it is windy, the pane moves and distorts all over the place. But the piece I want to use in my animation is kind of small so idk about visible distortions.