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View Full Version : rain of thumbtacks - nparticles to mesh w dynamics?

Theodocious
07-24-2009, 03:07 AM
I'm looking to basically drop a bunch of rigid objects that I don't want to physically place a thousand times before running a sim. I want a particle emitter to emit the objects (in this case thumb tacks) which each are running a rigid body dynamics (a little bounce, no deformations), so they fall randomly but have good inter-particle reactions for deflection. How would I go about setting this up? Thanks!
mandark1011
07-24-2009, 08:39 AM
if your using maya 2009 try using nParticles. I haven't had much luck with PP attributes and the nParticle instancer but it sounds like you just want a simple collision so that stuff is pretty much built right in.
Good luck
Noggy
07-24-2009, 02:11 PM
I would like to know how to do this too.

I know Houdini you just plug your Geometry node into your particle node but Maya is alittle more complicated.
Theodocious
07-24-2009, 06:16 PM
yes, I am trying to do this with nparticles

man, this is harder than I thought. It seems there's no way for the nparticles to inherit the dynamic properties of the rigid body? when I add rigid body dynamics to the instanced object, every particle simply runs the animation that's on the object.

is there a way to give the nparticles the collision mesh of the instanced object?
davegreenwood
07-24-2009, 06:40 PM
Have a look at this:

http://code.google.com/p/bullet/downloads/list

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=675357

rigid body array is probably ideal for this...

Dave.
Theodocious
07-24-2009, 08:41 PM
ohhhhh so close... it's exactly what I'm looking for, except doesn't look like you can bake the custom meshes for rendering yet. The plugin rocks though, makes me wonder about just going back to blender and spitting out an .obj sequence for rendering. I loved bullet dynamics
davegreenwood
07-24-2009, 08:58 PM
ohhhhh so close... it's exactly what I'm looking for, except doesn't look like you can bake the custom meshes for rendering yet.

geometry cache?
Sphere♥
07-25-2009, 01:36 AM
ohhhhh so close... it's exactly what I'm looking for, except doesn't look like you can bake the custom meshes for rendering yet. The plugin rocks though, makes me wonder about just going back to blender and spitting out an .obj sequence for rendering. I loved bullet dynamicsCheck out the bottom of page 7 from that thread (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=86&t=675357&page=7&pp=15)... try the scripts.
Theodocious
07-27-2009, 10:09 PM
I got it. Combine the 2.72 release of dynamica 32bit with maya 2k9, and the RBD tools script, and you can get exactly what I was trying to do. I couldn't use the RBD mesh baking script because I was using 64bit maya. Dynamica really puts maya rigid bodies to shame, and you can use maya dynamics forces! Gonna post some vids soon. Anyone interested in a step-by-step tutorial? It's really not very difficult at all.
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