Blender For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Dropping Objects in a Scene with Rigid Body Dynamics

Not everything that reacts to physics has the internal jiggle and bounce that soft bodies have. Say, for example, that you have to animate a stack of heavy steel girders falling down at a construction site. For that animation, you don't want to have a soft body simulation. I mean, you could technically get the correct behavior with really stiff settings in the Soft Body Edges panel, but that's a bit of a kludge. You'd be better off with rigid body dynamics. As their name implies, rigid bodies don't get warped by collisions the way that soft bodies do. They either hold their form when they collide, or they break.

Unlike the other physical simulation, the controls for rigid bodies aren't in the Physics Properties. Not yet, at least; there are plans to integrate the rigid body simulation tools with the other physics tools in a future release of Blender. In the meantime, however, the way to get rigid body dynamics in Blender is to use the integrated game engine. That's right. Blender has a game engine built right into it!

If you used earlier versions of Blender, you may have already looked around Blender's interface and tried to find the game engine settings and controls. With the changes that came in Blender 2.5, the game engine is now treated like a separate render engine. To make Blender's game engine settings available, use the ...