I've been archiving my Free Jewelery DLs with the label "Treasure - ..." for a couple years now. What I'd like to do is place them in a modeler with gravity and drop them all on each other one by one. Does anyone know of a Free Modeler that can do this? After about 4 years of 3D experience I'm finally getting into my modeler, Carrara 2, now, thus I hav'nt much experience at all, and do'nt think it's Bounce behavior will be able to ricochet at all. If we ca'nt find a free one can anyone recommend something as friendly as C2?

Carrara has a phsyics option. You set your object's animation setting to 'physics' and then add a force aimed downwards. Place a plane down, (NOT an infinite plane! They don't work properly for some reason.) Place your object somewhere up from the plane and run your animation. The 1st time through will take longer to play then subsequent playings since the physics engine has to do the math as to how your object should react with it's universe. The next time will be played without the extra math, unles you make a change. Then it will figure the physics out again. I've played with it some and found many cool reactions of objects. You can assign a couple of settings to your object on the effects panel of the properties tray. Hope this helps!

I'm so very happy to hear C2 has this function! I've been hoping not to ever need to leave MC's old style of 3D apps. i.e. P5, V4, B5, C2 for thier much more complicated bretheren. This kind of caps things for me! I just browsed around through the Tutorials and Back Room areas, for physics Would you care to post a few screenshots, to help me get things going? I'm sure I'll be needing two different reactions from the force striking either the ground plane or another object, ore and stone. I ca'nt think of any other materials that may be in my collection. Has you seen presets for either anywhere?

Here are a couple of screenshots showing a quick animation of a rubber ball and a couple of slanted squished cubes. 1st- Insert a ball. Set it's motion to 'Physics.'Then set the balls physics parameter to 'rubber.' I then modified it a little bouncier. 2nd- Insert a 'Directional Force.' Leave it's default values. 3rd- Insert a cube, then squish it vertically. Rotate it slightly. Set the cubes physics parameters to 'wood.' Duplicate and rotate to taste for 4 of them. 4th- Place the ball up from the cubes slightly off-center so that it will bounce off of one of the cubes. 5th- Set the animation length to 12 secs 6th- Hit play on the animation controller bar. It will do it's math and you'll see a bar across the top, (see screenshot,) that will tell you when the calculations are done. It will play a little of the animation, then re-calculate the next couple of seconds. It will go back and forth playing and calculating until the end of the animation time is reached. 7th- Rewind and play again. It will play through without stopping to re-calculate. 8th- Render and enjoy! Hope this helps!

Here's the parameter's for the ball's physics and what the calculate dialog box looks like. If you want to you can stop it by hitting the 'escape' key.

Attached Link: http://www.bluetones-productions.com/BallBounceOffWood2.gif

And here's the animation. Enjoy!

Wow, that was fantastic, thank you so much, I'm saving this to disk and will be studying it much more! I buried my face in the .PDF manual ve the past few days and managed to put a scene together. I understand how to put in a directional force, and then how to then set an object's Motion to Physics, but was having alot of trouble seting my objects Physical Properties Parameter(Thanks to for the second screen shot!) The first setback I hav'nt overcome has to do with the Carrara Manual pg. 474-483, "Carrara wo'nt let you move an object that has physics applied later than frame 1," but now I'm wondering what we do about object you do'nt plan to introduce untill later frames, lik after other objects have settled? The Directional Force Graphic, on page 484, also has me a little puzzled, as it has Direction Value fields I do'nt see? BTW - I found using the timelines scub very fast for previewing the scene. It maybe faster than pressing play...I'm not all together sure, but that is what the manual said to do..just thought I'd mention it. Thanks again for posting screenshots!

Don't make the same mistake I made of trying to animate objects before centering their hot-points first.

Attached Link: http://www.bluetones-productions.com/BallBounceOffWood3.gif

With an object that you don't want to introduce until later: Either make a second scene that starts where the new item enters with everything else still in their places, or Make a seperate directional force for each object. In the case of my little scene with the balls: 1- Drag the directional force onto the sphere. Reset it's angle so that it still faces downwards. 2- Duplicate the sphere, (which will duplicate the directional force to.) 3- Set the second directional forces setting for strength. Set it to 0 at frame 1, then go to another frame and set it to the default, (if that's what you want.) It will set a keyframe for that directional force to activate 'gravity' at that time. 4- Play through to see if you like the effect. 5- Render and enjoy! :> The link is to a second animation with the second ball hanging in mid air, the dropping like the first.

I think in a frame you can delete a moving object and gravity force and start with a duplicate object in its place with different physics settings.

With physics the 1st frame is all you can set for the object. How could it start in place with physics settings that are different at a later frame? Changing the force at a different time is the only way according to the manual and to what I have experimented with. Or 2 different scenes that are otherwise identical with different settings at the switchover, and edited together with a video editing program.

Here is an example of what I'm trying to accomplish, thanks a bunch for your second demonstratation! What I was getting at keyframing for was to add more treasure objects as the scene plays, but now I'm thinking I can just add them all on top of each other, over and out of view of the scene, untill the fall in front of the camera, all in the first scene, and with only one dirtectional force!

Allthough, with working on this scene some, I have a few more questions:

1.) Objects Browser - Is there only one place to view thumbs of Carrara's Installed Objects? I see them in my Browser:Objects palette, but I remember seeing race cars, and all kinds of other miscelaneous objects in the manual. Why do'nt objects put into the Objects browser retain thier shader settings? And why is that when I drag an object in, from the objects pallette, it registers in the scene at a very distant coordinates?

2.) Are there any gemstone shaders, for C2, around? I spent about 6 hours, yesturday, making Amethyst, Emerald, Sapphire, and Ruby, from the "Strange" shader(That I'd like to put in the feestuff area,) and would like others to compare!

3.) Have we seen a 3D Browser anywhere, this would be very helpful previewing many of the gem meshes I do'nt recognize by name.

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=106&Form.ShowMessage=1743939

4.) I am also very much intertested in Multi-Replicating many of the objects I plan to introduce into this scene, and have started a post at the attached URL. Basically it is asking if C2 can copy and then paste(In a predifined pattern) an object, many times over, at once? I know Bryce can do this very well, but have searched the the C2 .PDFs and come up empty.