So after having an successful experiment with RigidBody physics, I wanted to try out the SoftBody physics. As far as I’m aware, there is almost no information about it, and what little there is is extremely outdated, talking about buttons that don’t even exist anymore.
Which helped me understand it’s basic features a bit.
But I wanted to apply them to a rigged character I made some time ago. He’s kinda of a goofy creature with a lot of parts sticking out which I wanted to make them move by using physics to make all those parts jiggle when he moves. I know how to apply it to the whole Mesh, but not separate parts. I saw a Vertex Group field, so I made one with all the parts that I want to make jiggle and added it in but it did nothing. Tried messing around with the settings a bit and still nothing.
How do you do it? How do you apply Physics to a part of a character only instead of the whole thing?
This is quite well known.
You just create a single dedicated vertex group in your characters mesh for the softbody to reference. Then select it in the vertex groups list and use weight painting to paint out the areas you want to be most affected and leave red those you want unaffected. Like you would paint skin weights. You have to fiddle with a few settings but it’s not all that tricky. There is quite a bit of information out there on it already.
Big respect and thanks to the guys who made these tutorials of course.
There were more on this subject in blender too, but these were just the first two I grabbed. There are even some Maya tutorials there as well where they are doing the exact same thing. But with Maya tools of course. But it might be possible see some different uses, situations.
It can be a bit imprecise though this method. I’m not a huge fan of it myself. I’m hoping soon we will see some sort of dedicated Spring constraints in Blender. I think it must be my most wished for feature in character rigging in Blender right now. That way you would apply softbody type effects directly to bones in the armature.
It would be a much more precise and controllable way of setting up jiggle effects.