First off, apologies if this is asked and answered somewhere, or if this isn’t the correct section to post this question; one of my biggest issues is that I don’t know enough about the topic to ask the question very well. But let me give it a try.
What I’ve been attempting to do is use softbodies and collision together to roughly simulate interactions between soft objects; since all I’m doing right now is using baked animations to help in modeling, this is fairly easy, but I’ve run into an issue when it comes to simulating an object being squeezed.
Basically, I don’t know enough about rigging animations coupled with softbodies; what I’d like to end up with is a single softbody object “squeezing” another softbody object, but I don’t know how to get the first object to actually apply any sort of pressure to the second (I’ve just been using basic, unrigged models up until now, much like the many Jello tutorials scattered about).
Let’s forget about the softbodies for now; I think I’m confusing myself. Basically, I’d like to have a hand, grabbing, say, a ball. I’m trying to do it using the physics engine entirely; not holding the ball in place with anything other than the hand’s grip, and friction. Is this even feasible, or am I being unnecessarily complicated with my approach?
I was thinking it would likely involve rigging the hand with an armature/bones, and then just keyframing it to “grip” or close around the ball object; my main question, I suppose is, can I do this while simulating collision and/or softbodies on both objects?
The other thing I was looking at is setting a goal for the softbody (say, set the goal as a closed hand), but in that case, I don’t know if I can open the hand and maintain the closed goal.
Not sure how clear I’m being; I’ve got a good amount of experience with modeling in Blender, and I’ve covered the basics with things like softbodies and collision, but this project is just a bit out of my reach; I’m not sure what tutorials I should be looking at.
Any pointers or help would be appreciated; I’m running Blender 2.54 right now, but I also have 2.49 installed if you’ve got tips that work on one but not the other.