Week 6: Animation - Rigid Body Dynamics

Late getting the posts out lately since class has been pretty intense this past week. We finished out last week with a short intro to rigid body dynamics. We will go over them in detail during the final week: Dynamics. We got to see the basics of how it works anyway. Rigid body simulations calculate the collisions between hard objects that do not deform or penetrate each other (basically hard objects). Soft bodies are things like rope, cloth..stuff that changes shape upon contact.

It's real-world based in physics so you need to assign things like gravity, mass, friction, etc...to all the objects, so you can get very realistic-looking behavior as things collide. However, the down side is since it's a simulation, you dont have direct control over the result or look like you do with keyframed animation. All you can do is adjust properties and see what happens, so it takes many many tries and the calculations too take a long time. So, its a slow process. That said, if you had to animate with keyframes 100 pencils dropping on a table and make it look realistic it would take much longer and probably still not look natural. But it depends on the scope and particular shot so it really depends.

Anyway, here are some pencils being knocked out of a Styrofoam cup by a virtual wrecking ball. I purposefully didn't spend time on the materials or lighting or add nice effects like motion blur since it takes sooooo much time just to run the simulation and I'm on a lowly laptop here. To see a higher res version click here.

Also, hello out there to my classmate's Marcelo's father-in-law. Glad to know I have at least one reader! haha. Thanks for reading!