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Is it possible to use soft body or rigid body dynamics to make this ball interact with surfaces and other objects? I will not be using normal gravity, rather, I will be animating it bouncing around and controlling its shape and motion, but I was wondering if i could improve workflow and cut out some steps by having the ball automatically 'squish' when put in contact with a surface, and then 'unsquish' as it moves away from the surface. So far, all I have been able to achieve with physics is an object that becomes totally deformed as the animation progresses.

I can achieve the desired result by using shape keys to create the 'squish', but I feel like this could be more simple.

Thank you for help!

enter image description here

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What I did...

1 Created a UV Sphere
2 Created a 2X2X2 Lattice
3 Created an empty
4 Parent the UV Sphere and Lattice to the empty object.

Now ...

1 Create a vertex group selecting the bottom half of the sphere
2 Named the group "GroupSquish"
3 Fit the lattice and deform it's bases, leaving the top half lattices untouched.
4 Made sure the lattice only affect the "GroupSquish" vertices on the sphere.

Finally ...

Move the sphere up and down you should see the effect the lattice have on the bottom half of the sphere. Of cos I created this pretty quickly and you could fine tune the effect further if needed.

So logically you can now animate the ball going up and down and it should just deform. And add horizontal/lateral(XY Plane) motion by animating the "empty" object! Voila!

enter image description here

Here is the blend file !!! How generous of me :)

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you! This means the automatic squish cannot be achieved with rigid or soft body, correct? $\endgroup$
    – WishyQ
    Apr 26, 2016 at 18:44
  • $\begingroup$ If you are using rigid or soft body to control the animation, you are basically depending on physics engines to do the work. Although this is a prefered way to work, but as you found out by your own experience it does have it's limitation and the lack of control from the artist's perspective. $\endgroup$
    – hawkenfox
    May 11, 2016 at 0:51

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