Efficient partial soft bodies

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3DModelerMan
Posts: 20
Joined: Thu Oct 22, 2009 2:02 pm

Efficient partial soft bodies

Post by 3DModelerMan »

I've been playing around with soft body physics and I was wondering what the most efficient way to simulate soft body physics for only part of a mesh would be (a character for example). For now I've only got soft bodies implemented for entire meshes, not parts of the mesh. Is there anyone here who has done this before?
c6burns
Posts: 149
Joined: Fri May 24, 2013 6:08 am

Re: Efficient partial soft bodies

Post by c6burns »

I did a demo once of an anime character with hair and clothing softbodies responding to wind and character translating and animating. I just divided the model into sections where I needed the meshes to be softbodies (eg. the hair and dress made into their own meshes and added as softbodies). Then I used anchoring to either completely harden or stiffen the soft body vertices in the areas where they attached to the character. The character itself was made of rigid bodies which were kinematic primitives kept in alignment with the bones during skeletal animation.

EDIT: Oh another option, which I thought about but didn't end up implementing, would be to use the bones of a skinned mesh to create bodies and constraints. For example, you could skin a character's ponytail onto a bone chain, physicalize it based on the base pose as a series of shapes and constraints, and then use the physics to drive the bones during animation.
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