Falling dominos...
 

Hi all - Can anyone point me to a web URL that has
a tutorial for creating falling domino's in Maya?

You know - where you knock over the first one in a
line, and they all tumble after each other.

Or if anyone's willing, would they mind explaining how
to achieve the effect by offering any dynamics advice,
pitfalls etc?

Thanks

Daniel

have you tried with just setting tham as active rigid bodies and using a hing to constrain them

Thanks for the reply Joe!

Ive gotten them to work OK now, but they tend to keep on wiggling and twitching after they've fallen. How do I make them sit dead still after they land?

Daniel

Select each domino and change the bounsiness value in the channel box to about .1

EDIT* - You can also change the bounsiness of the surface they are on. ei - the passive rigid body.

2nd EDIT* - And if you want them DEAD still like you say, you should actually change the bounciness to 0. This does actually help with playback time b/c Maya has less calculations to perform.

Yup that should just about do it.

Good work Darkware.:p

Ha! I tried doing dominos a second ago with bounciness at 1.1. lol! It literally looks like a pan full of popping kernels!

Edit again* - Alright, this had better be the las tthing I tell you because I'm getting tired of pressing the edit button. Anyway, an easy way to get the first domino in motion is to change the initial velocity in the channel box AfTeR you have made it an active rigid body. This should push the first domino forward just enough to make it tip over. If it's pushing it too much you can change the mass in the channel box as well. Increase it to push it slower and decrease the value to make it lihgter, which will push it forward faster.

on aliaswavefront.com's 'How To' section there's a tutorial for Newton Pendulum (the thing with the metal balls on string that hit each other). I'd suppose would use the same effect, but change the balls/string into dominos...:)

When someone finishes a domino animation upload the clip.