Animating Chess Pieces

Question

I'm trying to animate a chess game and I'm struggling to make them collide. I'm animating each piece then trying to make them a rigid body so that they collide when taking a piece. But instead they just go right through each other with no simulation.

I'm new to this so I didn't know how to add a video. Please help.

Answer 1

UPDATE:

ok, you did all the changes i proposed.

Here are the next steps:

1. change all sensitivity margins to 0 (active + passive rigid bodies)

2. apply scale to the board

3. increase the speed of the bumping man so that it hits the other one with more power and he should beat him up more

it's just physics, the harder/quicker you push, the more likely it will fall. And if you hit it more up, it will fall easier.

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first - it is always helpful for us if you tell us what kind of experience you have with Blender. So we know how to answer you.

I would really recommend you to watch some beginner tutorials, there are tons of free tutorials out there, maybe begin with the "official Blender tutorials": https://www.blender.org/support/tutorials/.

And i would recommend to start with little easy projects (like the one i show you at the end) so that you don't get frustrated because you don't get the result you want. Blender is really amazing - but complicated - as the real world is ;)

Why do i recommend this to you? Because your file consists of so much beginner mistakes (which everybody did, but maybe you would do less if you watch some tutorials to get a basic understanding of Blender).

I name just a few mistakes, this will NOT solve your problem, but lead you in the right direction.

1. you meshes had partially wrong face direction. You can check face direction here if you check "face direction". Everything which is red is "normally" bad and a mistake (if it is not inside).

2. if you don't have "easy" geometry like cubes and spheres, the convex hull will not work right with rigid bodies, you have to change the shape to "mesh"

3. only objects with rigid bodies will be part of rigid bodies world and can act as rigid bodies. If you don't give rigid body to them, they just do...nothing. (exceptions are soft bodies etc...but the theme here is rigid bodies so i stick to it)

Your white "man" doesn't even have rigid body.

4. a simulation cache where the start frame is bigger than the end frame does not make sense

5. rigid body type: passive objects normally don't move. That's why they are called passive. Like walls, floors...active objets are supposed to be moved/animated. BUT...an active body at one frame can either be animated (you can keyframe values - animated checkbox is on) or you let Blender let calculate the physics - animated checkbox is off). You can change this of course. e.g. you can animated a cube (fly a bit), then turn off animation and let Blender do physics like this:

maybe try to rebuild my cube animation. If this works, go ahead!

My plane has rigid body passive.

my cube has rigid body active.

I checked "animated flag" for my cube.

I keyframed 2 locations for my cube.

on the last location i keyframed my "animated" checkbox.

on the next keyframe i keyframed my unchecked animated checkbox.