Lynda.com - Creating Rigid Body Simulations in Blender (2013)

Meet the family of rigid body simulation tools available in Blender and learn how to create realistic 3D movement and collisions. Author Joel Bradley starts with a simple rigid body simulation, where you choose a collision type, set the initial state, add basic properties, and output a render. He then introduces techniques for creating more advanced collisions with proxy objects, concave objects, force fields, and constraints. Finally learn how to create interesting fracture patterns and effects, and control fractured geometry more easily with the Bullet Viewport Constraints tool.

Introduction
Welcome
Working with the exercise files
What you should know before watching this course

1. Creating a Basic Rigid Body Simulation
Getting ready to use the Bullet engine
Setting up our objects for simulation
Setting up the physics world
Choosing a collision type
Applying a collision shape
Improving our simulation's accuracy
Creating an initial state for our simulation
Creating an animated rigid body
Adding physics properties
Outputting a render
Baking to keyframes

2. Taking Rigid Bodies a Step Further
Planning out the shot
Setting up the rigid body types
Understanding concave and convex meshes
Working with the mesh collision shape
Applying physical properties
How and when to use a proxy object
Adding a force field to the mix

3. Rigid Body Constraints
Understanding constraints
Setting up a Fixed constraint
How the Hinge constraint works
Using the Slider constraint
The Generic constraint

4. Fracture Effects in Blender
Enabling the Cell Fracture add-on
Creating fracture patterns
Using an object's vertices
Creating fracture patterns: Using particles
Creating fracture patterns: Using the Grease Pencil
Holding it all together

Conclusion
What's next?