Hey All,

I’ve decided to mess around with RBD as it is one of the areas of softimage I know little about.  I thought a Roulette wheel wood be a good test, so i’ve constructed a simple wheel and got it turning.  The RBD’s seem to work with the exception of trying to get the ball to land into a slot while the wheel is moving.  It is hopping out and never seems to lose energy.  I’ve reduced elasticity and increase friction and cannot work this out.  The wheel is moving fairly quickly but the average speed of a normal real wheel.  Do I just need to whack the Substeps up with the Subdivision Depth?  Currently it’s at 100 and 8 respectively.  I’m not sure how high people push these Substeps etc.

Would this be better done in ICE?

Cheers

Burg

Rigid Bodies in XSI are tricky as far as my exp goes.
You might get lucky by having someone answering you here that has a lot of exp in this area, but my guess is that you’ll probably end up tweaking a lot before getting it right, if ever at all. Here are a few things to consider:
- set your collisions on exact (not convex) even if all the objects are convex and see how that goes.
- increase the poly count of the geometry involved in collisions.
- increase the simulation steps to an absurd value then lower it until your sim breaks down.
- play with different combinations of which objects are active and which are passive.
- pray to your God/s if you have any :)

Good luck,
McNistor

p.s. You might have to start learning ICE if nothing will get you where you want. It’s a more complicated path, but you’ll be so much better in the future with similar and different projects.

Edit:

A little off topic here, but I wanted to say that I have a feeling that RBD engine will some day suffer the same faith as old particle system, that is extinction. I might be wrong, but either way, learning ICE is a safe and good investment of time and resources. Hell, I should start listen to my own advices starting now.

Thanks for the reply!  I’m kinda gathering that it is very difficult to get what I want.  Most of it is changing arbitrary values and crossing my fingers :( I can’t seem to get it to stop ping back at a too high speed without even with Elasticity down very low.

Perhaps I should ask on the ICE thread how do it with instanced geometry.

Thanks again

Burg