Can someone walk me through setting a basic pendulum swing using physics?  I've read the manual and tried several different methods, but I just can't wrap my head around it.  Also, can you apply physics to a group?  I can't seem to find a way to do that either.  Thanks.

Chucker

As long as you want hard body dynamics it should be pretty straight forward.  Model a pendulum, punch a hole in the top where you want the pivot point.  Run a cylinder through that.  Enable physics on the pendulum object and hit the calculate physics button.  That should be it.

As for applying physics to a group, I'm not sure.  What kind of group?  If you want the objects in the group to act independently I'm guessing you'll need to turn on physics for each item individually.

I've attached a .car file that I set up I had to rename the extension to .jpg so hopefully it will still work once you change that back to .car.

I hope this helps.

Quote - As long as you want hard body dynamics it should be pretty straight forward.  Model a pendulum, punch a hole in the top where you want the pivot point.  Run a cylinder through that.  Enable physics on the pendulum object and hit the calculate physics button.  That should be it.

As for applying physics to a group, I'm not sure.  What kind of group?  If you want the objects in the group to act independently I'm guessing you'll need to turn on physics for each item individually.

I've attached a .car file that I set up I had to rename the extension to .jpg so hopefully it will still work once you change that back to .car.

I hope this helps.

Thanks!  The file worked just fine.  I had mine set up very similar, but my pendulum kept falling through the cylinder.  I guess I need to start over from scratch - must have something buggy going on.

As for physics for groups... what I have is actually a sign with a metal chain on both sides to hold it up on the rod/cylinder.  I wanted to apply physics to the entire sign (which is made of several individual parts grouped together).  The chains would stay rigid so no need for separate physics for them.  But it doesn't allow me the option to assign physics to a group.

EDIT: I just tried here at home on the 6.1.1 version and it allowed me to apply physics to a group of objects.  I was working on a PC at work with 6.0.  Guess I will try to update the work version and see if that fixes the problem.  Thanks again for the help!

Chucker