Workflows : Blender Game Engine : 1

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Lately I have been studying the Blender Game Engine a lot and I would like to share my workflow with you all.



Today I was trying to understand the Sphere collision shape in the Bullet engine (as implemented in Blender).

Parent: Bullet_Sphere (RigidBody, Radius 1, Sphere Collision Bounds)
Child: Render_Sphere

I observed that the Collision Margin has no meaning for Sphere (and Box, Triangle Mesh, Cylinder)

Create Groundplane, and three cameras. For the groundplane create a solidify modifier with an offset of 0. Grouping the various game entities will help in a seamless workflow.

I usually setup Logic Bricks on the Groundplane for saving screenshots of my game and also for switching cameras.

Since I have created a Group for the Bullet_Sphere and Render_Sphere, I can instantiate it in another Layer in the Viewport. When I created the Group (bullet_sphere), they are at the World origin.

In a separate layer, I instantiate the bullet_sphere object. The awesome thing is that, Blender Game Engine will consider Group Instances and build game engine objects from it. This way we can create one or more intances and run the game.

For this test, I have also created Static game engine wall objects and grouped them as well.

I can now run the game and switch between the cameras.

Now that I am satisfied with one instance of the asset, I instantiate more of them and study the behavior.

Bullet_Sphere : Friction - 0, Elasticity - 1

Bullet_Sphere : Friction - 100, Elasticity - 0

Bullet_Sphere : Friction - 1, Elasticity - 0.5

And finally for stress testing the physics parameters for the asset, I create a LOT of instances (3,696 of them) and run the simulation.

And the video you have seen (or you will see now) shows the final result.

Hope you enjoyed learning a trick or two from my workflow. Feel free to add a comment and I look forward to hearing from you again.

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satishgoda at live dot com
satishgoda at gmail dot com