Rigid Body Physics

I’ve spent quite a bit of this book talking about physics – how the objects in our world tend to fall and bounce off of one another. This informs how the objects in our animations ought to behave as well, but as animators, we usually key this behavior deliberately. The ball in Chapter 2 might look as though it’s governed by the laws of physics, but we did all the work to make it look like that – we were the ones in control. But what if we don’t want to be in control? What if our aim were chaos and destruction?

What if, for instance, a character were to flip over a table, or smash through a brick wall? Using conventional techniques, this would require animating a great many things with great effort, but if we don’t particularly care where the objects on the table or the bricks in the wall end up, we can simply let the program do the work for us.

Rigid Body Physics is a feature that simulates the physics of rigid bodies...