I have modeled a wooden box with separate parts all parented to an empty to keep them together. I want my character to pick up the box, then throw it on the ground where it breaks apart. But I can’t seem to animate the parts without them either not moving at all or falling straight from their start location. What do I need to do/change to make this work?
Personally I would not use the physics engine until the box collapses - you can decide which frame the physics simulation starts on. It should be quite simple to hand-animate the movement of the box through the air: moving in a straight line through X and Y, and through Z it curves up then down.
It may be that the physics explodes the box anyway - Otherwise you can have an invisible object (ie on an unrendered layer) hit the physics object and make them brake apart.
Yes, that’s what I would do as well, if I knew how to do it. I don’t see any way to tell Blender to start simulating on a particular frame. I’ve found how to do that in the past for soft bodies and fluid, but rigid bodies seem to be missing the option. Am I blind?
1: Set you’re animation’s start frame to the frame the box explodes
2: Bake to keyframes (physics tab L side of 3D view)
3: Adjust start time.
That’s not working. Most of the time, it won’t let me bake anything. When it does, the parts of the box simply fall straight down despite previously being in motion. Shouldn’t they have momentum? And when they hit the ground, that’s it. No bounce or anything. I even tried adding wind in case that might help but it seemed to have no effect.
Giving an object a starting velocity may help…
Can you post the .blend?