This tutorial was originally conceived by Andrew Price from Blender Guru, but we're going to expand on some of his ideas.
Ball and Chain
First off we're going to create a linked chain of rings. Open a new blender project, delete the default cube, and replace it with a torus. Rotate the torus 90 degrees from the default plane, then duplicate (Shift +D) and move the second ring to be threaded perpendicularly through the first. Duplicate these links until you're happy with the length of your chain. Be careful when placing them to ensure that each ring doesn't overlap. Then we just need to tell Blender that these are rigid body objects. Select one of the links - then head over to the Properties editor (right side of the screen), select the physics tab (the blue bouncing ball) and select "Rigid Body" and from the "Shape" field change the default from Convex Hull to Mesh (this just changes how the rigid body physics are calculated). We can easily apply this to all the links in the chain by now selecting all of them (Shift and Right click), and choosing 'Copy from Active' on the Physics tab on the left of the screen. Now test out your animation skills by pressing Alt+A. If your chain falls down then you've done everything correctly. If it explodes (as mine did!) then check that you have changed the shape object to Mesh for each link in the chain. Add a plane and scale it up (S) to give your chain something to fall on. However, to stop the plane from just falling down you will need to set it up as a rigid body object (as we did for the chain) and simply change the type from Active to Passive. You can pin the chain at the top by selecting the top chain link and de-selecting the 'Dynamic' checkbox in the Rigid Body pane. And feel free to add a wreaking ball to the end of the chain by selecting the bottom link, going into edit mode (Tab) adding a UV sphere and overlapping the two. Now you have everything you need to make a swinging ball and chain (increase the mass of the links to increase the chain strength).The array modifier
Now we want to generate a large number of things for our wrecking ball to slam into (or drop onto). For this we can use an array modifier (which is found on the right hand side panel in the tab with the little wrench). Create a default cube and apply the array modifier to it and as you increase the array number you will see the number of repeats increase as well. You con control the axis of the repeats by the sliders under the Relative Offset box. Add an array modifier for each axis (i.e. 3) with a number of 1.02 to each (allows a little gap between all boxes) and apply them to get a stack of boxes (this will work with any shape so go nuts with Monkey heads instead if you like). Finally, as we did above, apply an Active Rigid body element to each box, reduce the mass to 0.1 - then test with Alt+A! If you've done this correctly, your boxes should collapse and explode. What?!
We just need to correct the centre of mass for each box (currently it's all placed on the original box). We do this by selecting all the boxes, the CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+C and selecting "Origin to Geometry". Now run Alt+A again and adjust your simulation. Enjoy!
Challenge: Use your wrecking ball (or another means) to topple a tower of 30+ cylinders
References
The original reference for this idea on how to do it comes from Andrew Price's video available here:http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/quick-tutorial-make-a-wrecking-ball-with-rigid-body-physics/#.U8RuZ0AW3J4. Andrew has also written a bunch of other fantastic tutorials which I highly recommend here: http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/
No comments:
Post a Comment