Dynamica

Dynamica is a pretty awesome plugin that even Disney used for the cool physics effects in their movie, Bolt. It works with four special Maya nodes that work together: dSolver, dRigidBody, dRigidBodyArray, and dCollisionShape.

Creating Nodes with Dynamica UI

You can whip up these different nodes using the Dynamica User Interface (UI). To get to it, just click on the Dynamica icon found in the EfxToolsLumiere shelf. It's super easy!

Global Parameters Control

Now, there’s only one node per scene, and it’s a big deal because it controls all the global settings for your simulation. This includes things like time steps and which library you’re using for your simulation. Plus, this node is created automatically every time you make a Rigid Body or a Rigid Body Array.

Understanding dRigidBody

dRigidBody is where things get fun! You can have multiple rigid bodies hanging out in the same scene. Each one has its own attributes that control how it behaves—think mass, damping, initial position/velocity, etc. You can set them as active or passive. An active rigid body interacts with forces and collisions during the simulation, while a passive one (also known as Kinematic) just follows keyframes.

Working with dCollisionShape

The dCollisionShape defines how collisions are calculated between those rigid bodies. Each rigid body connects to a collision shape, so it's best to pick one that accurately represents how you want collisions to behave. Remember, simpler shapes lead to faster simulations! The available shapes include: sphere, box, infinite plane, convex hull, and mesh. If you're dealing with concave meshes, stick with mesh shapes for precision; otherwise, go for convex hulls since they speed things up.

The Power of dRigidBodyArray

dRigidBodyArray is like having a bunch of rigid bodies grouped together but sharing the same collision shape and simulation settings. This is perfect when you want multiple bodies with the same shape but need them to perform quickly! Key attributes here include NumRigidBodies along with InitialPosition (Multi), InitialRotation (Multi), InitialVelocity (Multi), and InitialSpin (Multi).

If you're looking to enhance your projects further or check out more about this powerful tool, feel free to download Dynamica here!