Ship falling over on landing

[AndyMalone]

Hi, I’ve added this to the lecture Q&A but wasn’t sure if it was worth repeating here too…

At the beginning of this lecture we add the Rigidbody component to our rocket ship object which gives it some cool default physics properties.

One problem I had however was that my ship design was using some extended spheres for thrusters/legs and as such when the object hit the launchpad it would tilt backwards off the pad (and then bounce along the floor like a bad balloon animal).

I probably could resolve it by modifying my ship design to make it more stable, however my solution instead was to add a new box collider component to my main ‘Rocket Ship’ object and set it’s scale/position to encompass the whole of my ships’s legs section. This way it gave it a nice flat, solid base to fall onto. You can see it in the following picture.

Not sure if this is the best way to do it but it seems to work so thought I’d mention it in case others have got creative with their ship design shapes and are experiencing the same problem.

[Morgaine_Christensen]

Great tip! I wouldn’t have thought of doing this.

[AndyMalone]

Thanks I’ve actually changed mine again since posting this and removed all the spherical colliders from my model elements, and then placed just extended this cube one up to cover the whole model (and tweaked the scaling to keep it tight).

As you can see in the second picture of my post the spherical colliders are based on radius which means they extend out from the body a lot. Now it’s more compact the collisions feel much more realistic in game (and it has the nice flat base for landing).

Going forwards I think I’ll probably bring the main cube collider down a bit and then put in a matched x/z sized sphere on top to at least give it a sense of the curve (then maybe another small cube for the nose cone) but for now it’s okay.

[Morgaine_Christensen]

I was wondering how it will effect collision with objects since not a cube
shape? I will have to check mine tomorrow.

[JixiPW]

Good post. Had similar challenges since my launch pad is made of different cylinders. So my spaceship was standing in the air 1m above the pad at invisible circular colliders. I deleted all colliders and created a mess collider at the widest cylinder and it turn out as intended. I found it hard to adjust the box collider, so ended up using the mesh collider.

[Sparsh_Bohra]

i was having the same problem with my human figure

[Ron_Storozyszyn]

Thanks for the tip. It was very useful.

[S_C1]

I ran into a similar problem where I had made my launch pad out of cube and a cylinder. The rocket would float down and sit well above the launch pad. I looked at different parts of the ship and nothing seemed to be the problem. Eventually I decided it was the launch pad.

Once I looked at the box colliders in the launch pad it was obvious the cylinder was creating the point of contact much higher than the visual surface.

I remember running into a statement that cylinders are basically capsules which is why the column box collider looks like a sphere in my case. I managed to move it below the surface of the launch pad and extended the cubes collider up to the top of the cylinder.

Worked like a charm. I suppose I might be able to delete the cylinders collider at this point and it would work just the same.

Editing the collider on such a short cylinder required me to move the x vertex on the sides out and then back in to reveal the capsule, then I could move the top and bottom vertex to change position.