SUCESS! thanks everyone set up your scene in the game engine and use place holders for the physics and then parent them to more complex objects.
I could animate them individually - but I would like them to fall using the soft bodies gravity- But have them not fall flat - right now they hit the ground like a flat balloon- I can upload a small video in a few minutes.
Q1. Can I get IPO curves from a softbodies collision and use them on another object?
Q2. How would I parent a heavy geometry object to a cube that is slightly larger and have the cubes soft bodies characteristics affect the child object?
Q3. My high polygon letters fall normally - but on collision they explode to larger than you can view in the view port- would lower polygon version work better?
I tried converting blender text to mesh and it looks ok until it hits the ground where the letter it self falls apart see video here - How to keep the letter together?
instead of using soft bodies, try baking the game physics to ipo. a good way to do this, is to make low poly mesh duplicates of your letters ( which i assume are in the form of text or curves ) , assign physics to them, bake the simulation, then parent the letters to the low poly stand ins, and move the stand-ins to another layer.
How would I parent the letters to simple cubes that frame each letter- soft bodies works fine on a normal cube and I don’t need tolerance that tight. Collisions can be approximat
I figured out the game engine in like 15 minutes - How would I bake the IPO curves so that they can be used to move other meshes?
Game engine is tricky I get a lot of gray screens if something is not perfect. I have FireGL5200 x2 so should not be graphics issue.
I didn’t know that record ipo was broken, that sucks. That’s why I never delete previous versions. anyway, a simple cube isn’t what i meant, i meant make letters that are basically the same shape as the ones you are using, just keep the polys down. I guess you could use soft bodies, but rigid ones seem like the thing for the job. I vaguely recall something about rigid bodies in either this last set of release notes, or the ones before. I’ll check on it when i have a moment.
I downloaded this BLEND file from the 2.48 test suite.
Open the file and press the P-Key in the 3D window. Everything looks fine.
Now turn on Record Game to IPO feature in the menu. Press the P-Key again, wait a couple of seconds then press ESC.
Press ALT-A and observe the mess. Objects are rotated the wrong way. The feature is indeed broken.
Sure it works with a simple cube, but I have tried it with more complicated objects and it fails. this broken feature is actually holding up the completion of scene for a project I am working on. And it is not just because constraints are used. My scene in question does not even use constraints, all 100% mesh objects without IPOs.
I choose this file as a demonstration simply because it is in the official “test” suite. So obviously it was not tested or it should not have been released. whats the point of a regression suite if no one actually tests it?
I also posted the “offcial” bug in the bug tracker and no one has even commented on it.
For the letters (the rest I don’t kn00b about): I’d type them in Illustrator (maybe Inkscape, too), convert to outlines (shift-O) - in Photoshop you’d convert them via layer-menu - and export single characters to SVG uncompressed. Then you just extrude them in Blender and have a perfectly clean mesh so they can jiggle
Atom, you’re right, I’ve got the same rotation problem with that file.
Anyway, trying with a new file and using other meshes it seems to work. But I’ve not tried out a complex scene yet.
As Atom said, there’s a bug with the record to ipo function, but it works with simple meshes.
By the way, I’ve not got the point about the Cube parenting…
Well I can export the IPO files right out of the game engine no problem here here is the results - thanks you for the handy tip - do use the latest Graphicall SVn builds and the IPO record seemed to work flawlessly - My ATI FireGL5200 only shows a grey screen and I have to use my render nodes built in GPu to see how it looks - argghh
