Does blender have a physics engine?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

I’m a newbie and I just want to know if blender has a physics simulator which can simulate events like collisions between two objects… like "reactor " in 3D MAX?

2

yep - it can do that

soft bodies
rigid bodies
particle collisions
and game engine

3

It does. check out the features page at www.blender.org and there is a good introductory tutorial at the wiki if I remember correctly it’s under the summer of documentation pages

4

yes we do, its called bullet, if you click on the button that looks like a litle purple pacman down in the buttons panel [(object, material, edit, scene)<-those buttons] thats where the stuff to control them is

to make an object do that you click actor and dynamic and rigid body and bounds(set the bounds to convex hull prototype for more complex objects) then press p and the simulation starts

edit: we have particle collisions?!

5

In short: Yes.

Blender’s physics engine is built into its game engine. I’m not very familiar with it, so it may be difficult to do things more complex than that youtube video. How it works is there is an option to record the physics of the game engine to IPOs for animation.

Another quick youtube search gave me this video which shows basically how it works http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8L7nYQqHGw&feature=related
Try searching around for more tutorials on it, I’m sure there are many

6

Yeh, blender has a pretty damn sweet physics engine. :yes:
Out of interest i made an animation which shows off some aspects of the physics (using the bullet engine a lot and particle engine a bit to.)

Edit - I used the technique mentioned above, using the game engine to record the bullet physics to IPO, then rendering the end results etc etc.

If you look around this site theres heaps of demonstrations of everything. Try using the search engine. Theres a lot of good tutorials to, so youll be able to learn how to use it all pretty fast if you want to.

7

and it has CLOTH now !!!

look for the cloth thread:

http://www.wxtools.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=25&Itemid=32

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/ClothSimulation#Cloth_Simulation