Hello,
I’ve rigged this wind-up toy, and it works perfectly as intended. The next step is to animate the whole thing crawling on the floor. I started keyframing the animation (basically, the whole thing is parented to an empty, and I’m trying to animate it), but of course, the process is a bit tedious.
My question is: Is it possible to automate it with physics? Maybe a collision floor and, on the tip of each leg, a rigid body somehow parented to the leg’s movement, with each of those connected in some way to a central mass?
Thanks for the quick reply! Yes, I saw that kind of animation, but unfortunately, it’s a different approach. The legs are totally rigid, pivoting at one fixed point and driven by wheels. I uploaded a side view as well to show the idea better
Hi, thanks!
Yes, the forward movement is not a problem.
In the following video, I have done the whole body animation with keyframes. My question is: Is it possible to automate that with physics?
No, it’s not possible, at least not with Blender. You might be able to do it with Houdini, but Blender physics are a barely functional minimal rigidbody solver and a non-functional cloth solver, both very out of date.
There are some complicated hacky things you can try with geometry nodes, but with the caveat that it will take much longer and be less controllable than hand animation:
Please note that the creator of those videos specially says “you should not do this”, in the context of “IDs not worth the time and effort”. But if you really want to, geometry nodes is pretty much the only way other than hand animation
That is possible - but you would have to “translate” your whole armature animation to a physics animation. So you can e.g. use - as @UnCommonGrafx wrote - the motor for a rotational movement, and rigid body constraints to connect your rigid body objects to that motor.
Physics in Blender is - in my opinion - pretty good and can do a lot - if you know how to do it
But it’s hard to combine armatures with physics.
You should do everything in physics.
So i just made a very easy and primitive animation here (yours is a bit more complicated - i just wanted to show and prove, that it is possible.
All i did was made 6 rigid body objects (floor - passive, all other active).
Then i gave 2 constraints to each leg: Generic (just x rotation allowed) and Motor.
Ok, I have managed to replicate the same structure I had but with physycs
I used a central body and each leg is a bit more complex than what @Blender_Fun1 fun proposed.
Each leg has a MOTOR attached to the body, a LEG that is pivoting in a GENERIC with some angle of freedom. The LEG is also connected to the MOTOR with a POINT constraint that is off axis.
Thanks everyone for the feedback! I upload the file as well. LB_PHYSICS_BA.blend (259.9 KB)
