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Add-on: Impulse - Initial Velocities for Rigidbody Objects

16

Nathan Craddock writes:

Hey everyone! I love making physics simulations, and throwing objects around in a scene is something that I commonly do. But setting all the keyframes and using real-world speeds is a hassle to do manually. So I wrote Impulse to help me. Impulse allows you to set initial velocities on objects to easily launch them around. You can also set a goal object for the object to reach. Here is a short overview of the features!

Download Impulse on GitHub.

Of course, it can be used for more than knocking down blocks with Suzanne.. :)
I made an animation recently of a whale on a roller coaster (I know, silly concept, but it works) and I wanted the whale to fall off, so I launched a meteor at it.

Anyway, enjoy using Impulse!

whale

About the Author

Avatar image for Nathan Craddock
Nathan Craddock

Hello! I have been using Blender for 6 years now. I dabble around with all the features, but I especially love procedural shaders and writing addons. I also make lots of art, which can be found on my website natezcraddock.com. I also love hiking in the mountains near my home.

16 Comments

  1. Nathan, very nice addon! I tried it out and is now enabled in my default startup. Good video too, thank you for not starting off with "First install my addon like this..."

  2. Nathan, I'm looking forward to using this, but I'm confused by the angular velocity being shown in meters/second. How does this relate to revolutions/second or radians/second, which are more usual?

      • Ok, thanks. It's a great add-on in any case and I'll show it to my digital modeling class at UCSC and recommend they install it for physic exercises. Considering we can choose between radians and degrees in the scene tab in properties you'd think there would be a way to use them in a script. I can ask around the computer science department here if you want.

  3. This is nice and probably someone will find it useful, but I don't really see the benefits of using this method.. just setting up 2 keyframes manually is easy enough. Especially when you want simulation start just before object hits something, because you can see where the object will be at that keyframe. Setting up an empty is a bit abstract. But as I said, maybe this will be useful to someone and especially because it's free anyway. Thanks.

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