Getting started with soft bodies in Blender

In this video tutorial we show you how to get started with soft body physics. They can be really helpful in many things, for example in adding secondary actions to your animations and thus making your animations more organic.

Written version:

We have a simple scene with a ground plane and Suzanne, to which we’ll add the soft body in the physics tab.

Then we’ll select the ground plane and enable collisions for it.

If we hit play, Suzanne starts to wobble. If we remove the soft body goal, she will fall down and collide with the floor.

We can increase damping and bending to make her keep her form a bit better.

The eyes are falling out because they are not connected to the rest of the mesh. Let’s fix that in edit mode by selecting the eye edge loops, and bridging them together with the rest of the mesh.

If we go back to object mode we can see that the eyes no longer get separated.

We can define specific areas to get affected by the soft body via weight painting. We’ll create a vertex group and then head over to weight paint.

Here we will activate face selection masking, select everything with the a-key, and then go to weights, set weight, in order to give the selection full weights.

Now we can lower the weight setting for our brush and paint the ears with a lower weight.

Let’s go back to the soft body settings and turn the goal back on. Then we’ll select the vertex group we just created and start playing with the various settings.

We’ll add some quick rotation to the object with keyframes, and then increase the goal minimum. If we set the goal strength default to one, then only the ears will wiggle.

This is a good way of adding some automatic secondary actions to your animations.

Thanks for watching and see you next time on OneMinuteVideoTutorials.com.

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