Quick Noodle Physics in Blender Tutorial

hello and welcome to this video from blender HD my name is jonathan lamp l and in this quick video we're going to be going over rope or noodle physics inside of blender so any sort of string or what have you so I looked around online and it seemed like there was some confusion going on about how to do this and there were a few different ways one of them worked pretty well that involves parenting individual vertices to empty objects and takes a really long time and it was pretty complicated but I decided to do a different approach that I didn't see anywhere and so I'd like to share it with you so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a curve so our strand is going to be a curve so I'll just add a path and I want it to collide with this little bar here and also the ground so I'm going to rotate it 90 degrees on the z axis just so it'll fall down straight and all we need to do now is make that a soft body make this object a collision object and this object a collision object as well so now if you play this back you can see nothing actually happens but that's because it's supposed to be heading towards a goal and normally this happens with vertex groups but since curves don't support vertex groups it's interpreting the entire object as a goal so we need to turn that off and we can see now it falls but it's acting kind of weird and it's not really working too well and that's because there's just not enough information in this curve so let's go into edit mode take everything W subdivided a few times alright so now we have a pretty thick strand of vertices we can play that back we see we now have a noodle that's working pretty well so this is really great but what if we want to add any sort of shape to it like a like a rope for instance so really quick what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump on to another layer and I'm going to make a circle then in edit mode I'm going to scale it down and I'm going to position this around its origin point so we have four circles around the origin and now in our curve here we can select it and in our curve options we can scroll down to let's see here geometry and choose bevel object busy a circle zero zero one I think that's the right one yeah okay so we have that and if we go back to layer two we can see that our scale influences the scale there so you can scale it down to the size we want so that's looking pretty good and now we can take this go into edit mode again and then we want to twist this around so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select this last vertice here over vertex and choose enabled for our proportional editing so when we move one it'll sort of proportionately move the rest and then I'm going to press ctrl T and that stands for twist so it's going to twist the rope so just going to twist a bunch just like you would and pretty much real life and then for this end part here I'm going to press ctrl T again but then scroll down on my mouse wheel so it doesn't influence so much of an area now back in object mode we have our rope and if we play it back we can see that it does work but it's still a little funny first let's move this over the side so we can see the animation how it interacts a little better ok so we see the floor even though it oh did I forget to add the collision object and it's my bad ok there we go now it's working pretty well but you might say for a noodle or a rope we don't want it to collide with itself and second of all it kind of clumps up way too tight we want it to be a little more stiff and the thing with curves when you're using them for soft bodies is that these settings right here in the soft body goal soft body edges they don't do a whole lot I mean if you turn it off you're going to get some pretty funny results but adjusting the settings don't work the same as they do with geometry and so what we need to focus is the self collision so I'm going to check that on and now you can see that it's not intersecting with itself anymore which is great but it still has those really tight bunches and to get rid of that we need to turn up the ball size and that's just the way of saying that each vertice has sort of a an imaginary ball around it and how large that ball size is determines how far away it will interact with the other vertices so we're going to turn this up to one and we can see that it is now much more stiff and the higher you turn this the more stiff it will become you can see if you turn it up too high it'll start interacting like that so too might be a little too high so let's turn this back down to 1.5 and see how that goes you see we still have that sort of bounce in the middle so let's just go with one and that seems to do pretty well and now we can also have these dampening and stiffness options so this is how much pressure there is between the points so if we turn that up really high you can now see at the tight curves here that they sort of expanded at a different rate so maybe you can see this more clearly if I turn this up again and you can see that there's a lot of pressure however if we turn this down to say point one we won't have as much of that stretchy pressure and we won't have as much of that pressure in between so it's just sort of a balancing act of deciding which settings are best for you and lastly we have this dampening option which is fairly self-explanatory it just dampens the the self collision with these imaginary spheres and so very quickly we have our rope animation and something that was for very difficult and now it is pretty easy and very simple so thanks for watching this quick little video I hope you learned something and I'll see you next time

Channel: Blender HD

Views: 152,666

Keywords: Blender, HD, tutorial, 3D, Blender (Software), rope, string, noodle, physics, simulate, simulation, soft body, animation, collision

Id: Lg7jxAMs60Q

Length: 6min 41sec (401 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2015