Mographfx Carl Animation & Physics Sim Expansion

by Carl's Sim Guides in Addons


New Trailer & Features Summary:



V1.6: New Feature - Form with Particles and Morph


As you can see, I've made yet another new feature for the addon. This uses the Track Particles Position tool to allow you to tell objects to track particles then move to a spot on a mesh. A second tool found just below lets you then give it a second mesh destination. From there you can use my animation offset and curve tools to make the animation more interesting, allowing you to morph between shapes! Read more on my changelog website.

Full Features Summary

  • Control and Convert Particles: MographFX can allow particles to switch from physics to animated mode, letting them form into objects.

  • Create Detailed Simulations: You can attach fluid and smoke simulation or particle emitters to objects and have them follow particles, allowing for unique smoke simulations that are animated by particle force fields.
  • Copy Animations to Particles: Create animations and attach them to particles, triggered by their birth or death time. Tell them how soon to run, and each particle will create an animation from its place of birth.
  • Animation with a Single Click: When dealing with thousands of objects, Blender can be slow. No need to select them, just pick a collection and you can incorporate complex rotation, scale and position animations and offset them with a single click! Use distance offsets, or offset only by X, Y or Z for accurate results.
  • Offset Animations: Offset animations based on object name or distance. You can reverse the result of either. You can also LIMIT the effect to only certain keyframes, keeping your existing animations intact!

  • After Animation: Create Extreme Curves: Users can tell the script to curve the position animation of an entire collection (restricted by frame range) and tell it how many keyframes to look at, allowing you extreme control over the curves. (One Limitation: Placing further keyframes may invalidate curves.)

  • Particles to Rigidbodies: Track particles and keyframe each, allowing them to follow a path up until the moment you tell them to stop (based on birth or death).
  • Secondary Explosions: When a particle death is detected, we can spawn an emitter in that exact location. Now supports collections, meaning you are able to create several types of explosion that will go off at the particle's collision or death location.
  • Tower Generation: Build Plank Towers and Round Towers for quick destruction. Tracks an empty to allow for multiple tiers and lets you relocate the empty to a new location. Automatically applies rigidbodies of the weight you set. Has a pyramid feature to automatically reduce width every x floors.
  • Spawn on Animated Mesh: Analyze the vertices or faces of an animated mesh and spawn any object there, be it rigidbody, smoke or particle emitter. If you let it be animated, it will follow the object's animation on each keyframe making objects that track your animated mesh. For objects with good normals, you can also align the objects pointing "up" in the normal's direction.
  • Constraint Generation: Select objects and the distance to search, and my script can automatically apply constraints to those objects. Limit max constraints per object to save your CPU some work. Use accurate mode to analyze meshes and try to find the closest place to connect.
  • Voxelize: Turn any mesh into cubes that you can apply rigidbodies to or animate using my other tools. Now supports the ability to fill a mesh and Colorize it based on image textures on the object. Choose a custom object to voxelize with that object, and even use with offsets to include particle systems, mantaflow or flip fluids on a custom object. Feel free to then animate and curve them for unique looks.
  • Chains: Make chains of any object, of any length. Automatically creates constraints between them, keeping them connected for simulation. High resolution chains and simulate cables.
  • Copy Animations: A quick tool to copy an object's animations and immediately unlink (make single user) so you can then use the offset animations tool. 
  • Chains of Particles: Start particle emitters using animation offset, based on distance or name.
  • Spawn at Location: Spawn any object at the location of all selected objects.
  • Remove Overlapping: Analyze rigidbodies to find those that overlap, and remove one of them for each detection. Helps avoid things exploding apart in densely packed rigidbody setups.
  • Easily set Collision and Rigidbodies: With one button you can remove or add collision/rigidbody to a group of objects, or tweak their weight. You can also remove or add animated to rigidbodies on a specific frame and offset this.
  • A Fair Price: Each tool is going for less than $1 each and I plan to optimize and add more customization features to each. 
  • Get Featured! If you make something cool with my tool, send me a message or email carl [at] carlsguides.com to show me, and you may be featured in my next trailer.


V1.5 Emitter Collections!


You can now use emitter and rigidbody collections with both the Particle to Rigidbodies tool and Particle Emit on Death. This allows you to analyze a collection of secondary explosions and create yet another explosion on top of it! You can also use this to randomize the rigidbodies produced when tracking particles to rigidbodies. It's something I've wanted myself, so this is new in honor of the huge SUMMER SALE on Blender Market from Aug 24th to 30th. Let me know if you have any trouble with this new feature!

V1.4 - A New Way to Fracture Objects!


The 1.4 update is out now and Voxelize has a great new feature! You can now create objects out of the mesh you've targeted. Since we already had a scanner for the mesh, now we can use Blender's in-built booleans to trace the mesh and have a nice, sturdy reproduction of the original for motion graphics and physics simulations.




A New Approach to Motion Graphics

My tool helps you to create Motion Graphics and unlock new possibilities using the Blender Particles and Physics Simulation systems. Easily create keyframes from one location to another with a curve to add some extra interesting movement, while also adding rotation and scale attributes. Offset these animations to make them more interesting!


You can create objects from other objects - either via voxels or by placing objects on each face/vertex of an animated mesh. Put particle systems on these objects and offset when they start. The addon includes extensive documentation via tooltips so you'll always know what each setting does. Here is a summary of every feature in the addon. This product has been heavily updated since release so scroll down to the updates sections to learn about all the major new features!

Compact Menu - Main Tools & Utilities


V1.3 - NEW Motion Graphics Improvements

I've just released a new update that makes the addon significantly more useful for producing motion graphics, and of course still has all the features that help with rigidbodies. Perhaps you can combine them to make unique things! The highlight of V1.3 is Voxelize improvements that allow colorization, accurate fill (99% of the time), custom materials, and CUSTOM OBJECTS, so you can create an object out of any other objects.

The best new feature is the quick animation segment. This allows you to tell the script to move an entire collection to another location and offset their animation in a single go. Pick a spot they should go to based on position, rotation and scale, and randomize that position so the objects come in from various angles. Using a custom object, you could even place particle systems or fluid (mantaflow or flip fluids) on the objects and offset that as well. 

Patch 1.23: Voxelize can Colorize


As of Patch 1.23 you can colorize voxelized objects if they have an image texture. This is tested as working in all versions of Blender I support (2.83+).

Patch 1.2 Video Guide:




ROUND TOWERS


One of my early goals with this addon was to eventually become proficient enough with math/coding to figure out how to create round towers. I DID IT and they are now available in version 1.21 that has been uploaded today. If I make a good feature that doesn't harm anything and isn't particularly bug prone I do not hold back on releasing it. You can download round towers now. An additional feature is the ability to Disable Separation when making towers. This lets you build something you like and separate when you're done working with the towers function, without all the waiting on objects to separate. It's also super handy for preparing the physics setup of a scene without blender bogging down. You can then use the Separate button to separate and fix the origin of all objects and proceed to run your simulation.

Patch 1.2! Voxelize, Offset/Clone Improvements


  • Voxelize - Added the ability to fill objects. Originally the script only traced the object. This is much heavier, but it changes physics simulations a lot to have that extra mass in the middle preventing such a fast collapse on collision.
  • Offset Animations - The ability to tell the script to ignore any keyframes outside of a range. If you've dealt with other offset tools you know they normally move ALL keyframes of every single keyframe on the object. This is why I limited it to certain kinds, but mine was indeed doing all keyframes in the timeline of that type. Here it uses only before and only after settings, which are pretty self explanatory. The default is 0 and 5500. No idea why. But look, you can say only after frame 250 and it will only work on frames 250 to the end of your animation. This is meant to help assembly/deconstruction animations or any other situation where you already have keyframes where you want them and only want to touch some of them. Doesn't work with particle start/end. 
  • Offset Animations - You can now randomize each keyframe +/- a percentage you tell it, to allow for some randomization and a non-uniform look. 25 = 0.25 = 25%. Just helping the mathematically challenged.
  • Offset Animations - The script now tells you based on current settings and the amount of selected objects when the animation would end. Saves you dividing 4000 objects by 0.07 frames. Accounts for "every x frames" setting to give you an accurate number.


  • Clone at Animated Mesh - Added Disable Keyframing option, so you can use it on simple non-animated objects (it always did, it's just faster) or only one frame of an animation. Looks at the current frame and object's position on that frame.
  • Clone at Animated Mesh - Instead of vertices, you can now center objects to faces. 
  • Clone at Animated Mesh - Added Align to Normals setting. This will give you objects pointing up in the direction of the normal with their origin point flush to the mesh face or vertex.


Update 1.1: VOXELIZE & 2.83 Support

Added support for Blender 2.83 and fixed a few minor issues. As I make art with my own product, I find more. You can send reports to me at [email protected], or use the messaging option on Blender Market!


  • Expanded support to Blender 2.91 and 2.92. Towers were unstable in 2.91 until I realized that substeps are MUCH lower by default. It uses steps per second, not per frame. So up those substeps in this version and it will be fine.
  • Added floor height setting to the Plank Tower generator tool. This will allow you to make rooms taller or stubbier than the default value while still retaining accuracy. Set it as high as you want. If you want weird looking towers, I'm not stopping you. But people will think you're weird.
  • Added the Voxelize tool that will convert a mesh to cubes (or spheres) based on the size you set. This can be handy both for simulation and animation purposes, especially with the animation offset tool.
  • Added Remove Overlapping. A one-button tool that scans particles and rigidbody objects for those that are too close. A setting of 1 will give you the object's exact dimensions for the search, but you can increase or limit how far it searches from around the mesh.
  • Bugfixes and improvements to tools to throw less errors if you have nothing selected and try to run one. This may still happen but not with proper setup for the tools.
  • Added Distance search to the Offset Animations tool. Pick an object or empty and it will look at those closest from the current frame. Change the frame and it'll instead look there, so you can play around and get new results by trying different configurations.

Detailed Tutorial


Particles to Rigidbodies

Turn thousands of particles into projectiles with ease! The tool can be used to track the location of all particles at a given frame and translate that into rigidbodies with animations. This is designed with the idea that on a particular frame you will allow the physics system to take over their movement, letting them slam into a targeted area and behave accordingly.

It's not stupid, it lets physics take over based on the birth time of each particle. You can also use particle death to calculate around when a particle hits, and tell the rigidbody to activate 2 or 3 frames before this moment for maximum precision.

Not disabling them will make them far too powerful, but even this has a purpose if you want them to cut straight through something. Since we rely on particles, they can be under the effect of force fields such as wind, turbulence, and vortexes, or rely entirely on the speed of parent particles to get their velocity.

I suggest viewing the tutorial to learn more about this feature.

Emission on Collision


Since we can track particles, we can also know when they die. This unlocks interesting abilities, such as secondary emission. It works best with simulations that have been baked to keyframes, but doesn't require them. Particles are tracked until death, and at the spot of their death an emitter of your choosing will be waiting until that particular frame. This is a feature from other particle systems (such as Trapcode Particular) that has not yet made it to blender. It's limited in relying on death, but it's going to unlock some nice possibilities. Especially when combined with rigidbody simulations that are keyframed, because the particles can interact with debris!

Voxelize!

Select a model and a size of cube. This will let you turn the outer shell of the object into a voxelized version. Then use my other tools to give it a rigidbody. You can now simulate models in a unique Minecraft-like voxel style. The main benefit here is that these objects will never be overlapping, and will be ready for rigidbody simulation.If you don't like it, undo and change the size to get a more detailed version. The script will give you some idea how many objects you'll be creating, but it will always come under this amount. The more close to a cube/rectangle the shape is, the more accurate the count will be. It does some trimming in the early phases to speed things up but is still going to take a while if you make 200k+ objects.


Quick Tower Construction


To give you a target for your Simulations, I've included the ability to create a quick cube tower, or a much more detailed and dense plank tower. Plank towers are spawned where you tell them, and you can use a controller empty to stack them at various widths and heights. It will also allow you to relocate the empty to start a new tower.

Easy Constraints!

One of my favorite features is the ability to automatically create constraints based on distance. It will analyze all selected objects and attempt to put constraints in logical positions based on the mesh. This works best with small, tight objects but will still be functional on large objects. 

Of course, you need control. Limit Max Constraints to search all the objects and it will save your CPU some work and only connect to the closest objects. You can choose if the simple constraints will be breakable, how much force it takes, and if collisions will be possible between the constrained objects. To add a bit of flavor, I've allowed you to select if some constraints will have a chance to be far weaker than others. 

Make Chains


We can also use more complex constraints to create fast chains, and perhaps toss a big ball on the end to create a wrecking ball. A chain of the length you specified will be spawned using objects you clone. Make a short thin cylinder and with 30+ it will behave a bit like a rope or cable. Move the master controller and rotate it then let gravity take over!

Clone at Locations

You can clone a selected object at the location of every object selected. Interesting with particle emission objects, force fields, and other types of dynamic objects. Choose whether you'll make the objects the parent of the new clone with an easy checkbox. Using this can allow you to scatter a simple stand-in and later duplicate in a more complex object.

Offset Animations

Offset Position, Rotation, and Scale animations to help produce motion graphics along with physics and particle simulations. To make things a bit more fun, I've also included the ability to offset Rigidbody kinematics, and Flip Fluids (if installed) or Mantaflow inflow objects. You can also offset particle start/end times if you'd like particles to go off in a sequence. Select an object, and you can offset based on the distance from that object and reverse order based on name or distance. It's fast even with hundreds of objects and does not interfere with animations other than those listed.

End or start Rigidbody animation on a particular frame, then use the next tool to offset when they start.

Remove Overlapping

To prevent overlapping particles from destroying simulations, I attempted a tool that would remove any overlapping from each frame of the animation. I liked this idea so much I made it so that you can select a group of meshes, and run the scan on all selected. Works best on objects that have similar XYZ dimensions, but may be very handy if you have thousands of rigidbodies randomly scattered and want to do a quick cleanup.

Awesome Tools

Easily hide or reveal large amounts of objects on a particular frame. You can also add Rigidbodies to a group of objects with a set weight. If Rigidbodies are already on the objects, you can use this same button to tune their weight and type (from passive or active). You can also add collision to objects whether for the particle deaths features or for use in other simulations. Need to batch remove rigidbodies and collisions? I've got you covered with a simple, fast tool.

I've also got a copy animations button that will let you pick an object and copy the exact animations from that object to those selected. This is the same as the link animations function, but it automatically unlinks them when it's done. It helps immensely when dealing with large amounts of objects and experimenting with the keyframe offset function.

Sales 500+
Customer Ratings 20
Average Rating
Dev Fund Contributor
Published over 2 years ago
Blender Version 2.83, 2.9, 2.91, 2.92, 2.93, 3.0
License GPL
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