Lecture 8 - Introduction to Reactor

To access the Reactor tool bar you need to left click on the blank space next to the Render Production button (The last button with a teapot on it) on the main toolbar at the top of the interface. You can then dock the toolbar either at the side of the interface or at the top, which ever you prefer.

To access Reactor, go to the Utilities panel and click on Reactor.

Your toolbar has six different functions: Reactor Collections, Reactor Modifiers, Reactor Objects, Reactor Constraints, the Property Editor and Playback and animation tools.

Click and drag a shallow rectangle into the perspective viewport and angle the rectangle slightly.

Place two spheres above the rectangle.

Because we want the spheres to fall and run off the rectangle, we need to make them rigid bodies.

At the top of the Reactor toolbar is the Rigid Body Collection. Click on this and then click in the view port. In the modify panel, you can see that a box called Rigid Body Properties has opened up. Click on Add, and from the search by name button, highlight the box and the two spheres. Click Pick. The three objects are now in the box.

At the bottom of the toolbar is the property editor, this allows you to add specific physical properties to your objects, here you can provide Mass, Friction and Elasticity.

• Inactive - remove the object from the simulation calculations
• Disable All collisions - causes the object not to collide with other objects
• Unyielding - makes the object immovable
• Phantom - makes objects so that they have no impact on other objects in the scene.

Simulation Geometry:

Before deciding on the collision boundary to use, you need to determine whether and object is concave or convex.

Click on the first sphere, and give it a mass of 5.0 and under simulation geometry change from mesh convex hull to bounding sphere. Repeat this with the second sphere and give it a mass of 15.0.

At the bottom of the toolbar click on preview animation. Now press P and the animation will play.