Sunday, September 13, 2009

Falling Domino Physics



This tutorial is based on Super3Boy's 19th Blender Tutorial. The link to his tutorial is in the description, and you can go to forum.nystic.com as well. His tutorials are great. He's enthusiastic and he's easy to follow. The problem is that he used an earlier version of Blender. The current version, 2.49, has a different user interface, and so some of his tutorials can get confusing if you're following along in the newer version. So I'm updating those that have been affected by the changes.

If you are thinking about making a game in Blender, you will probably want to learn about Blender's physics engine as well as the game engine. Blender's physics makes the objects move more realistically. This tutorial touches both on the physics and the game engine, as well as showing you how to create a video of it.

So let's get started. Start up Blender with its default scene.
1) X erase the default cube. If object not selected navigate to it and right click to select.
2) Space Add Mesh Plane
3) S 5.
4) Left click object mode tab.
5) Space add mesh cube
6) tab object mode - S x make thinner.
7) S y make thinner.
8) Front view.
9) Z key - wire frame mode to see the plane.
10) Select the block - G move over to edge, close to plane.
11) Actor - Dynamic - Rigid Body - Bound - Box.
12) Domino - P key - goes to game engine.
13) Esc gets out of that.
14) Rotate the block a bit with R. with P falls over.
15) Duplicate these. Shift D across the plane.
16) You can texture these later. P key - they all fall over.
17) Get out of wire frame - solid mode.
18) Shift - D , rotate 90 - put it on top - make a building thing.
19) Then P key, they all fall over.
20) Alt A doesn't animate.
20) Then Game, Record Game Physics to IPO.
21) Alt - A then you can animate it.
22) Then you can create a movie out of it.
23) Scene F10.
24) Preview preset.
25) Quicktime.
26) ANIM button.
27) Output folder.
27) Falling domino video.

Hope you liked it. You can do a lot more - texture to make real looking dominos, falling bricks with cubes stacked on top of each other. You can be real destructive without, of course, having to pick up the pieces. Enjoy!