Environmental Animation - Blender Foundations: The Essential Guide to Learning Blender 2.6 - page 366

Figure 13.9 The irst attempt at soft body simulation, beside the current state.
measurable amount of heat. Obviously, that's not going to happen here. To extract energy from the simu-
lation, we need to use the Damping control. Default Damping is 0.0, and we already know what that
looks like. So, crank it up to its maximum, 50.0, and see what happens with Alt-A. Figure 13.9 shows
the difference between our first attempt after 200 frames, and a fully damped attempt. With damping turned
up, the simulation forces the petals to sag a bit, then they stop and sit nicely like all good flower petals
do. Doing a rule of halves test, damping set at 25 shows about one bounce, which still looks kind of silly.
Let's keep it at 50.
Now, let's add the wind. Go find the wind force Empty and bring it back to the same layer as the shears
and flower. If you press Alt-A and nothing different happens, try toggling one of the settings in the soft
body properties back and forth, forcing the system to refresh itself with the wind taken into account. To
further stiffen the flower petals, enable the Stiff Quads option in the Soft Body Edges panel. I usually
use Stiff Quads, as it provides a little more shape retention.
We're not going to need it, but the other major setting you can use to good effect is Mass in the main
Soft Body panel. Raising the Mass, which defaults to 1.0, causes affected parts of the mesh to be heavier.
Thus, they are harder for something like the wind force to move. However, once they do get moving,
they have more momentum, and everything that brings along with it—more energy, more bounce, more