2021.03.04
Small fixes and tweaks, with one pretty cool new feature - the ability to animate the transition between active and passive mode for any rigid!
- ADDED Animated Transition Between Passive and Active It's now possible!
- ADDED More Scene Visualisation You can now visualise the internal rigid bodies at the scene level
- FIXED More Robust Passive Rigids The start frame now does a better job representing passive rigids
- FIXED Better Scaled Shape Rendering Shading on scaled shapes now render correctly
- FIXED Consistent X-axis for Sphere Radius Rather than the average of X and Y
Transition Between Passive and Active
Active rigid bodies can now be made passive interactively, and continue to be animated as passive, and then - here's the cool part! - once they transition from passive to active, they inherit the animated velocity you gave it!
Pay special attention to the fact that we can key the simulated values, such that we can continue animating from exactly where they left off. Making for a clean transition both to and from physics!
More Scene Visualisation
The rdScene node has been able to draw velocities, trajectories and constraints to help you track down problems or gain better insight into the inner workings of the solver. Now it can also draw the current position and orientation of rigids, regardless of where your animation controls are.
This can be especially helpful if your controls have locked channels, such as translate, as they would be unable to show you the translation of the physical version of the control.
Here's how it works.
See how the box as-seen from the scene falls down, whereas the original box doesn't? Because the translate channels were locked, they weren't able to fully represent the simulation.
Here's a more practical example of a tail.
Notice that because the translate channels of the tail are locked, they remain positioned according to the rig. And the rig has some clever mechanics going on to keep the tail attached to the body even when the hip control moves away.
Here's a close-up of that mechanic.
The solver shows you what is actually going on physically and can help track down controls that misbehave.
Better Scaled Shape Rendering
Small, but important. When you scale things, rendering needs to keep up and descale the normals of the geometry.
