Apple Rain 001 from Red Orchid Productions on Vimeo.

I almost deleted this but I thought it was funny. This is an early attempt at a falling apple animation. This is using soft body dynamics so the apples kind of squash but what is really funny to me is the fact that they seem to be shot out of a cannon:)

Ok so here is the concept… this is a promo for “Outstanding Teacher” a segment on our news here at NTV (Tory’s Day Job) Students write letters to us telling us why their teacher should be “Outstanding Teacher” of the month. So it is like bringing an apple to the teacher right?

Well I wanted to play that up and have the promo joke about how MUCH more special this is than bringing an apple. It’s like dumping a crate of apples on the teachers desk!

The problem is I am working in Blender 3d and there is not a great way to get this to happen. My first thought was to use blenders particle system and set up some simple geometry for them to bounce off of. I set this up fine and the apples were linked to the particles great… the big problem is that the particles bounce off of the plane at their center not at the edge of the mesh. So they would not collide until half way through the desk.

I tried setting up a soft body simulation to fix this but not only did it make the apples squash it was making blender crash all the time.

So the final solution?

I tried to fake it as best I could… I set up the particles and the moved the collision object out from the actual objects. This is not perfect, they do seem to collide before endearing the “real” object but they don’t react correctly with each other and seem to not have apple shapes… But the shots are pretty fast and it is just supposed to by silly anyway :)

Here is the final spot…

Outstanding Teacher Promo from Red Orchid Productions on Vimeo.

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If anyone has any tips please let me know in the comments!:)