blender 2.66a Rigid Body Animation

Let’s desing a simple scene containing some torus and connect them with each other to make a free moving chain by gravity.

We used to use “Blender Game Engine” to simulate a physics motion and record it to use in rendering. Now, we have a powerful feature “Rigid Body Tool” embedded in 2.66a version.

1)    Add a torus and make it smooth:

2)    You can duplicate it and rotate by 90 degrees in x axis:

3)    You can continue as much as in this way to make a longer chain, rename them from the properties panel:

4)    Now let’s select the Torus1 and click “Add Passive”.

5)    Second and the rest will be “Active” rigid body (Ctrl-R shortcut is helpful):

6)    When you press Alt-A for animation, you will see them they are exploding 🙂

7)    Go to the first frame (Shift-Left Arrow), and let’s give each active torus “contsraints” to connect the previous torus:

8)    Let’s look closer to the physics panel and change some values like this image:

Selected Torus2 has a “Hinge” value and Object 1 is Torus1, Object 2 is Torus2 itself.

9)    Do this 8^th step till the last torus. And press Alt-A again!

10)  Give some materials and background to render the animation with cycles or blender internal render!

Some tips:

·         For repeating actions you can use F3 menu shortcut to recall that command.

·         You can also use “Point” instead of “Hinge”

·         For very slow animations you can use baking “Rigid Body Cache” placed in “Scene” panel

Here is my animation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJW1EPEgMVo

View Documentation: http://tr.scribd.com/doc/129477966/Chains