Environmental Animation - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 365

With your goal group created, bring up the Physics proper-
ties and find the Soft Body panel. Use the Add button to
create a new soft body simulation for the flower. Figure
13.8 shows the option-laden soft body interface. Fortu-
nately, you don't have to mess with everything here to get
a decent result.

The first thing we'll do is assign the vertex group we just
created. On the Soft Body Goal panel, which should
already be enabled, choose the “goal” group from the
Vertex Group selector at the bottom. Press Alt-A in the
3D view, and see what happens. The flower petals go crazy,
blasted out by the wind. Select the wind Empty and put it
on another, hidden layer. Force objects will not affect simu-
lations on different layers. Now when you press Alt-A, the
flower petals completely wilt and swing about. Not really
acceptable, but at least it's doing something.

It would be great to have the petals at least try to maintain
their original shape a little bit, while still being simulated.
Without going back to the Weight Painting interface, you
can accomplish this right from the Soft Body Goal panel.
The Maximum and Minimum controls allow you to
specify the range over which the goal vertex group is inter-
preted. In the actual vertex group, our painted values run
from 0-1. As a default, the Maximum and Minimum con-
trols in the Soft Body Goal panel do as well. However, if
we change the Minimum control value to, say, 0.9, then
the entire 0-1 weight painting range is remapped to the new minumum and maximum values: 0.9-1. So,
by making this simple adjustment, you provide the equivalent of 90% goal seeking to the flower petals.

Figure 13.8 The Soft Body properties and controls.

Now, pressing Alt-A shows the petals sagging a little, then bouncing lightly in place. Still not great, but
they aren't collapsing anymore. While the petals should have the ability to spring back from sagging or
being pushed around by the wind (or other force field), that bouncing is too much.

While there are a number of ways to accomplish this, only one works really well in my opinion. You
could raise the Goal Stiffness, which pulls the deformed parts of the mesh back into shape with more force;
raise the values for Push and Pull Springs in the Soft Body Edges panel, which does the same thing through
using the mesh edges as additional springs; or even try raising the Friction value in the main Soft Body
panel. All of these solutions introduce other variables into the process though, and none of them make
the little thing stop wiggling completely.

The problem is that there is just too much energy in the simulation. In the real world, the motion energy
would generally be absorbed by the physical structure of the flower itself, bleeding off as an almost non-