Week 9

Reactor tool

This week in tutorial we learnt how to use the reactor tool, i've been practicing the reactor tool for a couple of weeks, as i want to use it in my animation, so i was able to complete the task quite quickly and help others who were stuck.

To use the reactor tool is complicated at first as there's more than one step but once you've done it a few times you don't forget it. I began by creating a wall from one polygon and copying along the x axis then copying on the z axis making sure none of the polygons are touching each other. Now create a plane but making sure it doesn't touch the other polygons otherwise the reactor tool won't work.

Once the wall is made, create a sphere and use the auto key to make the sphere pass through the wall.

select the bricks that you want to be knocked down, and select customize, show UI, floating tool bars. discard the tool bars except the reactor tool bar.

With the bricks still selected open the property editor which is on the reactor tool bar, and change the properties to mass 20, select inactive and bounding box, then close. Now select the plane and change the properties to inactive and concave mesh, then close. Lastly select the sphere and change the mass to 20, select unyielding and mesh convex hull. Now save, as once the reactor tool is animated i can't be undone.

Now selecting the bricks, sphere and plane we can add a rigid body selection which is on the reactor tool bar, This tells the reactor tool what is part of the animation.

NOW HERE'S THE FUN PART!

Select utilities, reactor, havok world 1, and change the z axis to 150, and the world scale to 15 and the collision tolerance to 1, and select create animation on the reactor tool bar.

Once the animation has rendered, when played the sphere passes through the wall, but the wall is knocked down by the force of the sphere.