I have a bi-ped character that I am experimenting with and would like to have him push, say, a cube across a flat plane. If I want him to pull something it looks like I would need to add a bone to the hand and then use a ‘copy location’ restraint. Is it necessary to do this for each item I want him to interact with? Also, if i want him to walk up a set of stairs, do I need to watch carefully every step so he doesn’t go ‘thru them’, or is there a way to add say a rigid body on these mesh items?
Not exactly sure how to phrase the question and I didn’t attached a .blend file on purpose, (hopefully) the questions speak for themselves.
Thanks!
Hi sandman2,
Unfortunately, there is currently (as of Blender 2.65 r52859) no way to have a pure rigid body outside of the game engine. As such, there are two possible solutions, each with drawbacks:
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Create your rigid body in the game engine and perform your simulation. Then, bake the resulting simulation to keyframes. Essentially, this will add a location keyframe at every frame in your simulation (so your timeline will basically just look like a yellow barcode). The advantage of this is that you will get an accurate rigid-body simulation; however, it’s a destructive edit, like applying a modifier: you can’t go back and change it. In addition, it clutters your timeline and makes even moving the rigid body difficult.
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Alternatively, if you’re willing to settle for some flexibility in your body, you could use the standard Soft Body simulation with a high Damping value (max is 10, so go for that). In particular, you mention pushing a cube across a plane - if you keep your cube with only eight vertices, you can keep a fairly rigid body (because simulations work on vertices). The advantages of this method are that it’s easily editable, but obviously it is still technically a “soft” body, no matter how rigid you make it.
I’ve attached a blend file showing a cube-across-plane example with softbody. I’m using a Force Field instead of actually pushing it, just so I don’t have to animate keyframes - but you get the idea.
WC
EDIT: I’ve started using the alpha version (2.65.10 r54399M), and it looks like there’s rigid body simulations built-in. So if you can wait a bit (or just want to go ahead with the alpha version), that’s probably your best bet. Will post video example soon.
EDIT 2:
Here’s a demo.
Attachments
rigidbodysim.blend (472 KB)
Miika’s blender build has all of the essentials features for blender, including rigid body simulations in the viewport, and adaptive smoke domains
MiikaHweb - Blender Builds
example here
Thank you both! Great help!