That's my question, basically. Say I wasn't looking to animate clothes on a character, say I wanted to animate a ........ trebuchet! For those of you who don't know, a trebuchet is like a cross between a catapult and a slingshot. It's a medieval projectile weapon that could hurl objects hundreds of feet and was more powerful than a regular catapult.
There was a challenge a few months ago over on cgtalk to create a trebuchet but it had to be done totally with dynamics simulators, only keyframes on events, like start. Now, in that, you would need rigid bodies for the trebuchet itself, the projectile, and the target and softbodies on things like the rope/chains that hold the projectile pouch, the puch, and possibly the chain connected to the weight. A simpler example might be, blocks falling down some stairs or a hillside. Would these scenes be possible with the upcoming 2.37 or are softbodies strictly for softy-type things?

thanks,
-G

I highly doubt it would be useful for these things, but given many small enough time steps it ought to be possible

softbodies are last I heard somewhat implemented, why don't you try a testing build?

I have downloaded the latest windows build as well as some earlier builds that had it built-in but hidden. The instructions aren't clear enough and I'm not looking to spend days searching through elysiun posts trying to figure out how it works. I'd rather just wait until it's finished and there's a little more proper documentation on how this feature works since it can cover many areas of animation. I'm patient enough to wait for a complete implementation, I was just asking for conversation's sake and for my own curiosity.

Now, based on what you said, are rigid bodies ever going to be added? Wouldn't having rigid bodies first be more beneficial? Is the only aim for softbodies to animate character clothes and hair? I would hope that the possibilities of this engine aren't limited to character-oriented things.

-G

gendou wrote:

Now, based on what you said, are rigid bodies ever going to be added? Wouldn't having rigid bodies first be more beneficial? Is the only aim for softbodies to animate character clothes and hair? I would hope that the possibilities of this engine aren't limited to character-oriented things.

It doesn't make sense to use logic when deciding which features to implement in an open source project because the development is guided by the percieved needs and motivations of the developers, not the users or what seems logical [unless these concerns change a developer's view]

so, that I know of, nobody is working on rigid body dynamics in blender now, but that is not to say that they will not [and that they are not playing elsewhere]. I'd imagine that most likely ODE will be integrated into blender [not just the game engine] at some point, but I haven't seen anyone discuss how the user would interact with a physics engine in something that isn't necescairly realtime [do you merely provide keyframes that give the physics a starting position and velocity, which it takes on its own or will there be a way of altering a simulated path......?].



as inconsiderate as it might sound, the best way to get an open source project to have something [a particular feature, a good community, decent documentation, a shiny icon,....] is to do it yourself. [then others will thank you...]




oh, and from reading the docs about soft bodies, it looks like they aren't doing any collision detection at the moment. it would be very difficult to do a bunch of things [cloth, hair, rigid bodies] in that state.... but you could still make some interesting animations which would have been difficult before.