Overtake Inverse Kinematics with Physics

[Cel]

I have animated the armature with IK until frame 70 and that works fine. Now I would like physics to take over, and the lamp to fall on the ground.

I cannot seem to get it to work.

I tried adding rigid bodies to the lamp parts and then keying Animated off at Frame 70. This results in the lamp part jumping to its original position that it was at frame 1. See screenshot.

I suspect the reason is because the mesh objects do not actually move at all from the point of view of their coordinate values, the location values stay fixed at start location. It is the parent armature that moves and only seemingly brings the lamp parts along - it is a visual illusion. That would suggest I would need to key in the location of each lamp part at Frame 70, but how do I know the exact coordinates that IK has taken them? Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

[Jaco_Pretorius]

Hi

Your suspicions are correct… being parented to the armature does mess with physics.
Managed a combination of armature and physics animation here:

"Solid Drawing" physics cheat

Decided to cheat the “Solid Drawing” with Blender physics (WIP below ): It took me a while to figure out how to mix armature key-frame animation and physics simulation…

This is how I did it:

Made the parent object the physics capsule which is itself not rendered… [image] Then Key-framed the physics capsule’s movement up until about 3-seconds in when the “animated” property gets key-framed to “off”… The physics should take over at that point. [image] The squash-an…

Did it by parenting the armature to the physics capsule (which is invisible and not rendered) and animating the animated property like you did.:

This may not work well for your case as there are joints involved. You may need to have a copy of your geometry set up for physics which becomes visible (or swaps out the rig) at the point you want physics to take over… once a object is in free-fall, you should be able to abstract the whole body to a single rigid body, but the illusion will fail upon your first impact.

Point is it isn’t that easy to do… The single capsule animation above took me a while to figure out. Don’t give up tho and good luck.

[FedPete]

Another trick option is to split your project.
A .blend file with manual animation.
And a .blend file with physics
Alle rendered to bitmaps and those bitmaps can be transformed into a video using Blender video.
There is no need to put every aspect of your animation into one .blend file.
Blender can also manage several scenes in one Blender file.

[NP5]

Glad you answered that! lol.

perhaps it shows why the course at the beginner’s first contact with animation does not add in physics too!