Add-on: Impulse – Initial Velocities for Rigidbody Objects
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!
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!
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…”
Thanks! And I remembered what people “hated” most about tutorials from the post a few weeks back, so I tried to make it short and sweet.
Are you referring to the piece I wrote about tutorial production? Glad to see it paid off! :)
Yep! I hope other people use it too!
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?
I’m working on fixing that. I wanted real-world units to be used with all of the values, but degrees / radians per second is not an option.
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.
Oh wow! What an honor! Also, I added the ability to use degrees/radians for the angular velocity! Its on GitHub right now! (Its just a checkbox beneath the angular velocity)
Wow! What a great tool, especially the Goal feature. Cloned it off Github, thanks so much.
Thanks for the kind words!
Nice !!! I’ve always felt the need for this…. I’m about to try it, thanks for sharing!
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.
Like you said, it is pretty easy to use the manual method, but this addon also gives the option of knowing the speed it will be travelling at. :)
Great thanks!
Hello; I’m a beginner for using blender and version of my blender is 2.79.how can I add impulse to my blender?
Hello! I have discontinued development on Impulse, but I am nearly finished working on an even better addon called Projectile (for Blender 2.80). If you want to try that, the link is here: https://github.com/natecraddock/projectile
If you still want to use the old version, download that here: https://github.com/natecraddock/projectile/tree/blender27x
To actually install, go to File->User Preferences->Addons and install from file (the .py file). If you want to do the 2.80 version, it is under Edit->User Preferences->Addons.
Hope that helps!