Reactor - Havok Engine

This tutorial was quiet easy to complete and showed several ways in which animating models can be made easier then creating them frame by frame. Using tools like this could be used in many ways including helping me animate parts of my project.

The process begins with creating objects and creating new rigging objects. Once this is complete you can add objects to the same reactor and set there properties to effect each other in the same way. For example in our tutorial we added a bowling ball and a flat box to create a bowling lane, and then added the pins to the same reactor. We could then change the gravity and other properties so that they were all effected by the same down force.

The ball is then given energy to move forward by animating a small section of the ball moving forward, and then starting the reactors animation from a frame inside of the 2 key frames. This means when the reactor animates the scene the ball is already in motion and continues to use the movement force it was given until it starts to come into contact with other objects, causing friction. This causes not only objects to rappel, bounce and roll but also slow down with greater amounts of friction. This causes a more realistic sense of movement and once converted to an animation can make a very difficult scene to animate pass in seconds.

These techniques could be very useful to create animations such as bullet events, car crashes and even character movement.

A screenshot of my first reactor experiment.

The first part of the tutorial we experimented with the reactor and to test the engine I moved the bottom plane on an angle to see if the ball would roll.

 

A video showing the first reactor animation.

The next part of the tutorial had us create the 3D bowling ally. The models where already in place and just required animating.

A video showing the second reactor animation