I completed a "rocket" simulation that I found in my "Maya Complete" book. I spent quite a bit of time fiddling around with things like the position of the impulse to get the rocket to do what I wanted.

I also had an Aim Constraint on the ground-based camera so I could watch the rocket from launch to crash-landing.

After the rocket engine "burned out", it would fall back to the ground and bounce around a bit.

I wanted to be able to position the camera so that at the end, when the rocket stopped rolling around, it stopped basically in front of the camera. However, I was never able to get the rocket to behave the same way twice in a row, so it was impossible for me to ever get that camera position exactly right.

Since I didn't have any turbulant fields or other intentional randomness I don't know what caused the problem.

Is this the kind of randomness everyone is experiencing?