S-TIER skill
Blender rigid-body spaceship — motors, constraints and drivers for flight
100k ft — What is this?
Blender rigid-body spaceship — motors, constraints and drivers for flight
50k ft — Why care?
Ian Hubert shows physics-driven vehicle animation in Blender: active/passive rigid bodies, hinge and spring constraints, motor constraints pushing against the ground as thrusters, gravity off, and custom properties wired via drivers with scripted expressions for throttle and lights. Mentions Erindale's XInputReader addon for gamepad control.
10k ft — Key takeaways
• A linear motor constrained to an immovable object acts like a thruster
• Expose custom properties and drive them with scripted expressions for interactive control
• Put thrust over the center of mass or the ship tumbles
5k ft — Tools & techniques
Blender, XInputReader
drivers, motor constraints, rigid-body constraints, scripted expressions
1k ft — Deep-dive / try it
I’ve been wanting to do this since I first learned #blender back in 2005 or so (with the olllld game engine!)- one of the funnest things I’ve learned in the past few years!
Huge thanks to @e.r.i.n.d.a.l.e and @akastudios.ig for all the tips and cool tools! If you’re into this sort of thing, definitely check out their stuff!
You can find Erin’s addon by searching for “Erindale XInputReader”
Also @lux.taylor.art has been documenting the whole process of making the spaceship set over on YouTube, if you want to check that out!
#b3d #animation #blender
Transcript excerpt
I'm going to animate my spaceship with physics, and it turns out it wasn't even that hard. In Blender, select the cube and hit F3, add active. It falls well through the grounding. But if we make the floor passive, it'll stop it. You can select a few and type connect, and it creates a constraint. There's a few options like hinge, which swings on the Z axis. That's really useful for adding like little dangling bits and stuff, or for giving a vehicle wheels. All this is simulated. Or generic spring, which is great for like little automatic wiggling stuff. But what if you want it to drive uphill too? Let's duplicate the constraint and turn it into a motor. Turn up the values, and it'll work with the hinge constraint to roll off a cliff. But where it gets cool is if we make the motor's second object something immovable, like the ground. Then a linear motor will actually push against it like a rocket. And let's turn off gravity, because we're in space. Now you want your thruster to be right over the object's center of gravity, which is the yellow dot origin here, or things will get totally out of balance. Although, we could use that to turn the ship, left, right, left, right, up, down, barrel roll. But you can only control the motor you have selected. Let's make that easier. Select the ship, and we're going to add a new property. Call it the gas, and the juice, and the headlights. Now in the side panel, we can see these new properties. They do nothing. But if you right click copy…