physics isn't working properly for me

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

I am following an online course and at some point the course leads to making a bowling scene.
Like this: (the image is made from a new file)

ta~da~.jpg1718×1017 239 KB

The task is simple enough: add physics. No messing with settings or anything, just adding actives and a passive and let the program do its magic. The idea is that we get a bowling ball hitting a set of bowling pins. And this is were my problem is.

When i add the physics nothing happens. To make sure i hadn’t forgotten i applied rotation, location, and scale just to be on the save side. And nothing happens. I started moving the ball while the animation played and the pins fell over, but only when i moved the ball. The ball then gets stuck in the first position i moved it to and goes back to doing nothing. I did at some point get physics to do what it should but i don’t know how i did that and naturally it hasn’t happened again.

I went to the q&a that comes with this particular lecture. Only to find out i am not the only one with this issue and of course there is no solution yet. The assistant to the course suggested to add anything while the time line is at frame 1, something i had already tried. He also said that if that didn’t work to give a link to my blend file so he could take a look. According to the assistant my settings are correct and there seems to be nothing wrong with it, except that physics isn’t working. His solution was to append the ball and pins into a brand new blend file. This worked for him. In my case it made the whole scene move upwards slowly -_-’ . At least that was something.

Here is a link to my original blend file.

Now i have to mention i did try to see what would happen with the different types of physics and as you may guess nothing happened. This means that for me at the very least blender’s physics is not doing anything for me at all and i have done Now i don’t mind that physics has this issue yet. However this course does go into animation and if i am having trouble with physics now that may become a fairly frustrating part. Of course i could make it look like it is working using key-framing, but this was supposed to be simple and easy.

On a side note i did try to look for an answer in this forum as well as google it. Unfortunately i couldn’t find anything that actually gave me a solution.

2

To start with there are a few things wrong with the skittles’ mesh. You have overlapping vertices and so you need to remove doubles on them in edit mode with all the vertices selected. The normals of the vertices are pointing in the wrong direction so you also need to recalculate the normals in edit mode.

You should activate gravity in the Scene panel.

You need to move the ball. In the revised blend file I have keyframed the movement of the ball for the first 10 frames. In the physics panel for the ball, the animated box is also keyframed to be selected during the first 10 frames. This imparts the initial movement of the ball. I have also changed the shape of the rigid body collisions to be of type mesh for the skittles. Hope this helps.

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Attachments

bowling1.blend (1.48 MB)

3

Thank you very much. I have to admit i don’t fully grasp the keyframing bit. But i got the pins to wobble and with the keyframing the ball is also moving.

4

Thank you very much. I don’t really grasp how the keyframing is supposed to work. But once i removed the doubles, recalculated the normals, and activated the gravity the pins started to wobble. I used the blender manual to get the keyframing for the ball done and now it works for me. So again a big thank you.

5

Thank you very much. Once i removed the doubles, recalculated the normals, and activated the gravity the pins began to wobble on their own. Now i don’t really grasp the keyframing bit (even after looking at your file) but with the help of the blender manual i managed to do just that. So again thank you very much >_<.

6

Thank you very much! I did as you suggested and it did solve my issue. I used the manual to do the keyframing part but i have to admit i don’t really understand it. At least thing are working for me