Simulation - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 281

Here's one fi nal bit of advice for dealing with strands for hair and fur. When testing your strand, alpha, and
shader settings, use the actual lighting you will use in your fi nal shots. Strand shading is very sensitive to light-
ing conditions, and settings that are fi ne-tuned under one set of lamps might be completely unsatisfactory
under a different set.

Soft Bodies

Blender's Soft Body simulator can be used to give bounce to otherwise rigid mesh objects. It is a fl exible sys-
tem that can be used to generate motion for everything from a snail's rubbery eye stalks to a princess's long,
bouncing hair.

Blubber

The primary use of the Soft Body simulator is to create blubber effects. These might be a gelatin cube on a
plate, a squishy ball, or the adorable fl ab on a little baby's belly. I did several tests of the Beast using the Soft
Body simulator, and, while it produced nice results,
I did not want the additional overhead of dealing
with a physics simulation in every shot. The mesh
deform modifi er produced suffi ciently good defor-
mations on the Beast's chubbiness that I didn't feel
it was worth the extra effort it would take to simu-
late it. Let's examine one of those early tests.

Figure 14.80 shows the Beast in weight paint
mode. A vertex group has been created and
assigned Weight: 1.0 for the entire mesh. This ver-
tex group will tell the soft body system which por-
tions of the model to affect and which to ignore.
Vertices with a weight of 1.0 will not be touched by
the system, and ones of weight 0.0 (blue in weight
paint) will feel its full effects. So, the entire mesh begins
as a 1.0 (red), and lesser values are painted anywhere
that the Beast exhibits enough extra love to need the
simulation: the belly and sides, the chest and the thighs.

Figure 14.80 The Beast in weight paint mode, highlighting areas

that will receive the soft body treatment.

In the Physics buttons , Soft Body is enabled for the
Beast on the Soft Body panel, resulting in Figure 14.81.
With Use Goal enabled, the vertex group created in the
previous illustration, called “blubber” is selected. Playing
the animation with Alt-A shows that the default values
for the Soft Body simulator are almost exactly right for
this! The effect is subtle and would be hard to see in an

Figure 14.81 The Soft Body panel