Dear all,
Being all new to Blender, this problem might be trivial, but I have tried to research without finding a solution i could understand.
I want two objects, say two spheres, to collide in mid-air and shatter. I have tried Cell Fracture, but I’m unable to animate the fragments as a group until they get activated and fly apart. I could not get linking animation to a parent body to work, nor animate the collection on its own. With a fractured objects at rest, there is no problem to smash it with another (non-fractured) body and get the desired result.
Thanks in advance!
Had the same problem here with animating cell fragments. Maybe I can provide a solution with this attached blender file which represents kind of the animation I wanted to make, but should also be suitable for you in some way. But there is one question left for me. Will come back to that later.
In my specific case, the fragments should move all together, before getting destroyed by a sphere. All fragments are Rigid Body “Dynamic”, “Animated”, “Start Deactivated” and have calculated Mass.
As you don’t want to animate location of all of your individual fragments, you could parent them to an Empty and “keep transformation”, so that the fragments do keep their relative position.
Pick one fragment, keyframe the animation property so that in the beginning “animated” is active and just before the collision, “animated” is deactivated.
Select all fragments and select the before mentioned fragment last (so it is the active object) and go to Object => Make Links => Animation Data, so that now all fragments have the same animation data.
Then, animate the Empty to move around, or, animate two Emptys (with fragments included) to move towards of each other, if you want them to collide like you described. Just double-check the timing of your keyframes from the Empty and the fragments that they “fit together”.
In my case I want to go a bit further
I don’t want the fragments (the cracks) to be seen before the destruction, so I decided to cover the fragments with an object which is slightly bigger and then parent all fragments to the bigger object instead to an Empty.
So at some point, right before the collision, you want to get rid of the “cover-object”. In this blender file it is very bad solved, to just move the object inside the floor to hide. Negative points are:
- if you have eagle eyes, you might see the animation
- if your object is in mid-air, you have no option to hide your cover-object inside somewhere else
Scaling down to 0 does not work, as it will affect the fragments as well.
Any other method to let objects disappear right on the spot?
CellFracture.blend (1.6 MB)
Just found out that you can keyframe the “disable in render” option in the viewer. So I let the object disappear with that option.
Hi Rusty,
Thanks for the solution, I finally came up with something similar. I was a bit annoyed that one cannot animate visibility in viewport, but sending the covering object to a location far away from view works perfectly fine for me.
Again, many thanks for your input!
/T
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