Book Image

Learn Blender Simulations the Right Way

By : Stephen Pearson
2 (2)
Book Image

Learn Blender Simulations the Right Way

2 (2)
By: Stephen Pearson

Overview of this book

Blender is a free, open source 3D software that allows you to create stunning visual graphics, animation, VFX, and much more! This book is an in-depth guide to creating realistic and eye-catching simulations, understanding the various settings and options around their creation, and learning how to troubleshoot solutions to your own Blender problems. In addition, this book can also be used to simulate the behavior of certain physics effects, such as fire, fluid, soft bodies, and rigid bodies. You’ll learn how to use Mantaflow, an open source framework within Blender software, to create fire, smoke, and fluid simulations. As you progress, you’ll understand how to easily produce satisfying rigid and soft body simulations, along with cloth simulations. Finally, you’ll use Dynamic Paint, Blender’s modifier, and the physics system to create eye-catching animations. By the end of this Blender book, you’ll have created a number of animations on your own, such as a campfire, waterfalls, and explosions. You’ll also have gained a deeper understanding of all the simulation options in Blender, which you can use to create portfolio-ready animations.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Using Mantaflow for Fire, Smoke, and Fluids
7
Part 2: Simulating Physics with Soft Bodies and Cloth
12
Part 3: Diving into Rigid Bodies
15
Part 4: Understanding Dynamic Paint in Blender

Understanding soft body settings and values

Now that you know how a soft body simulation and collision objects work in Blender, it’s time to get into the technical details and learn about all the settings and values and how this changes the simulation. While going through this chapter, I suggest you test out the settings for yourself so you can visualize how they work. You can download a basic .blend file that I have created for that exact purpose from https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Blender-Simulations-the-Right-Way/tree/main/Chapter06. When you open this file, you will find just a basic scene with an icosphere and a collision object.

Now, let’s talk about the settings!

Object settings

When you first select Soft Body in the Physics panel, you will see a lot of settings on the right side, as we can see here:

Figure 6.10 – Object settings

Figure 6.10 – Object settings

Let’s start out from the top and work our way down, as follows:

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