Physics in Action

Meet Jun Soo! He’s teamed up with instructor Russell as part of Game-U’s New York Accelerate program. Jun Soo loves to work in the 3D modeling and animation software Blender, building game assets like dinosaurs, trains, and robots. This class, Jun Soo modeled and animated a short scene to learn how Blender’s rigidbodies can help make animations more realistic!

Ever play a video game and wonder what makes the props (like a sword, a bridge, a bush, or a stone) solid, so that the player can’t walk through them? The rigidity of these familiar objects lends realism to the game environment and provides the basis for player-prop interactions. In Blender, the mechanism behind a “collidable” model is called a rigidbody. Rigidbodies come with a set of properties that control deformation, and they share those properties with the objects they are applied to. Russell helped Jun Soo model a marble course and apply rigidbodies to its objects, so Jun Soo could see rigidbody physics in action!

Jun Soo began his scene by modeling the objects it contains. Once the marbles, the funnel, the slide, the table, and the text object (which should, in real life, all be able to interact) were complete and equipped with rigidbodies, Jun Soo and Russell used Blender’s physics simulation to accurately recreate the movement of the marbles in relation to their speed, size, slope, and contact surface. The marbles fall into the funnel, bounce off its hard (rigid) surface, roll down the slide (picking up speed along the way due to the slide’s steep angle), and strike either the text obstacle, the table edge, or both, causing rebound. While code and many algorithms come into play behind the scenes of this animation, the rigidbodies supply the crucial component – deformation properties – and Blender does the rest!

Cool work, Jun Soo! It’s exciting to see what you’re learning and how it can help build fun, challenging, realistic games. We’d love for you to stay in touch as Russell shows you more of what Blender can do. Game on!