Physics Simulation

We are going to be enabling physics simulation in our scene.

If we were to just move the chair or table into the air without turning on these features they would just float in the sky as if they were already on the floor saying gravity does not exist. The reason for this is it expensive for the CPU to simulate physics. Well when running simulations for the real world gravity definitely exists. So let’s get that turned on.

For the chair head over to the details panel to the Physics category. You will see a Simulate physics checkbox that is currently unchecked. If we check and hit play physics will happen in our scene.

Next we are going to bring in a cube and watch the same thing happen. We will have to turn on Simulate physics for the cube as well.

Now if we uncheck the enable gravity checkbox we can see our chair float away.

The only reason the chair is moving is because of inertia by the box falling on it, but gravity does not effect the chair itself as it is turned off.

The other important property is the mass of an object to set the weight of an object.

We are now going to knock the lamp off of the table. We are going to place the cube over the table and increase the cubes’ mass to do more force.

There goes the lamp! Welcome to our quick intro the physics system!