Thursday, March 29, 2012

I LOVE Sketchy Physics

As many of my readers know, I've been looking at Sketchy Physics from afar for a while now. This week I started getting into it in earnest, and I have found a new obsession.

Sketchy Physics is a free plugin (download it here), which has been around for a few years now but isn't very widely used - there is precious little info out there to help one learn it. Plus it's a little clunky and not entirely intuitive. But if you go on YouTube and search for "sketchy physics" you'll see some amazing models, so I'm guessing all of those very smart modelers were self-taught.

Yesterday I played around with some basic shapes, and built a really fun domino run. Here is the set up:



You knock over the first domino, and they start to fall:


Here's how they look when it's all done:


And you can keep going, throwing the rest of the dominoes around, even off their table and into the infinite abyss below:

Check out the video. It's fun flinging things around and seeing them bang into each other. I let each of my kids have a go and they were also thrilled.



I've written up the steps for this project, which will be available as part of next month's Projects of the Month, going out to subscribers on April 15. I really want people to get into this awesome plugin, so I'm running a special on the subscription - instead of the usual $36 for the year, from now till the end of April you can sign up for just $20.

I'm also planning a Sketchy Physics project book, and soon I'll be sending out feelers to see who's interested. You'll get hooked like I am!


Anyone can design anything in 3D! http://www.3dvinci.net/

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1 comment:

Kurt Meister said...

Cool! I used SP recently in a course. Unfortunately SU crashed very often when we wanted to build in some hinges and servos. I could not figure out what the bug splat caused, neither I got advice in the SCF. Perhaps a user in Your blog may help?