Mographfx Carl Animation & Physics Sim Expansion

by Carl's Sim Guides in Addons


Documentation on features in the order they appear with the add-on menu.


Constrain by Distance

Use this feature to attach rigidbodies based on the connection distance value (in meters). Strength of Bond determines how much force will be required to break the constraint. Max connections gives you a hard limit on how many connections each object can have. There is a cleanup max tool to fix this if you delete constraints. 

Objects can have constraints that are breakable or not via the checkbox, along with whether attached objects are able to collide. You can provide a percent chance that a given constraint will be up to x% weaker than the others using the following two options.

Accurate mode attempts to look at the mesh and put constraints in a more intelligent position, but greatly increases the time it takes to run. I suggest only using this on a couple hundred objects at most.

Use the Create Constraints button to then run the script on all selected objects. Constraints will be put into their own collection for easy cleanup or tuning.

Quick Cell Fracture

The  Quick Cell Fracture button simply calls the cell fracture menu if you have the addon installed. It will not be visible if you lack the addon (enable it in blender's addons menu).

Copy Particle Animations

One of the more important features of the script. First, pick a particle emitter then an object you'd like to clone. The End Animated function will change particles from animated to non-animated rigidbodies x frames after the birth of each particle. You can also set the weight.

Use the Particle Positions button to run the script and track al particle locations with keyframes and rigidbodies with the weight you set.

If you like, you can also trigger the change from keyframed to physics using particle death. Simply allow their lifetime to expire, or place a collision object with kill particles in their way. You can offset when they will turn into rigidbodies by using a negative value in the 'offset' function.

If your object to clone has a particle system, use the checkbox to tell the script. This will make it start each particle system on the birthframe of its parent particle. This, too, can be offset.

This feature assumes you don't actually care about the particle system, and I recommend hiding it when done with the script, but you don't have to.

Cleanup Overlapping attempts to reduce the density of particles when you've used too many, but it's not guaranteed to work. This requires further development.

Particle Emit on Death

This is a second major feature of the script. It assumes you might like to keep the particle system, but it's not required. This will watch for particle death on the main emitter. In each location where a death was detected, the chosen secondary particle system will appear, set to go off at the moment of death. You can offset this by a few frames (say -3) so that you can start the explosion a little early which helps with realism.

Particle systems that are cloned will each be unique. Set the maximum amount of particles you'd like on the secondary emitter, along with the maximum velocity. You can then give a value like 50% to random particle amount or random velocity to allow the particle count to be randomly chosen in the 50 to 100% range. It allows you to go all the way down to 1% for wildly varying particle counts and velocities.

Create Box and Plank  Towers

The box tower function is very simple and will make a 3-dimensonal array in the size of your choosing at 0,0,0 in world space. The Plank Tower generator is much more advanced.

Select an empty or any other type of object, and the tower will be built at its origin. The empty chosen will be moved as the tower is constructed, allowing you to build another tower on top of the first. Move the empty to a new spot to make a new tower.

You can select each tower's width and height (in floors). The Divisor setting will make the tower smaller the higher you set it, and weight will make sure each plank is set to the chosen weight. After construction the planks are automatically prepared for rigidbody simulation, so expect massive towers to take a bit as they are separated into loose parts and given rigidbodies.

The pyramid feature, when checked, will let you say every X floors reduce width by X amount. So a 10 floor tower with the setting 1 for count and 1  for width would be reduced by 1 on each floor. This can be used with large floor counts and high count values to automatically make a tower somewhat like a skyscraper.

Make Chains

Select an object, and make chains will chain this object vertically up to the max count  with the scale selected. They will be given rigidbodies and connected with a flexible constraint. This can be handy for making rope type movement from your rigidbodies, but can be a bit wonky if it's moved around too much or made far too small. Increase substeps in the rigidbody world options to have a better time.

Copy Animations & Unlink

Select an object to copy animations from, then select all the objects you'd like to inherit its animations. This is the same as linking animations, only it automatically makes those animations single user after the linking process in order to save you a bit of time.

Offset Animations

This feature has come a long way. While I like addons that copy animation, I don't like that they do all of them. This will only offset the selected animation types. You can select from Position, Rotation, Scale, Rigidbody animated/kinematic, It also has settings to look for inflow settings on both flip fluids (if installed) and Mantaflow (blender's built in smoke and fluid Sim).

It is also possible to offset when particle frames start. You can select how many frames between each object's animation, or use  EveryX to move several on each attempt. Objects are ordered by name, but you can use the reverse checkbox to do the opposite. It's also possible to select an object with Use Distance and reverse that as well. So several ways to help your motion graphics efforts with simulations and simple Blender animations.

Rigidbody & Collision  Add & Remove

Based on the name, you're going to be really surprised what this does. If the objects already have rigidbodies, it will also change them all to the type you specify and/or tune their weight. It's just a fast way to swap out the weights of a bunch of rigidbodies, or add them initially. Adding collision is something I added because Blender lacks and easy way to copy collision to tons of objects.

End Rigidbody Animations

This simple tool lets you swap between beginning/ending Rigidbody animation keyframes at a certain point. Used with the offset tool you can do a lot of shuffling with just a few clicks. If you have  created particles with my particle tracker and wish to hide them until birth, use the 'Use Birthframe' checkbox, and it'll scan each rigidbody for its birthframe and hide it in renders until that point.

Clone at Locations

Select an object you'd like to clone, and whether you want to parent it or not. Now, when you pick a bunch of objects that object (entirely as-is with materials and modifiers) will be copied to the location of all of its parents. This may allow you to use simple stand ins or scatter simple objects while setting up all the particle systems etc on one. Now you can use my offset animations tool to change when they start or end by animating this one object's keyframes. 

Sales 500+
Customer Ratings 20
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Dev Fund Contributor
Published almost 3 years ago
Blender Version 2.83, 2.9, 2.91, 2.92, 2.93, 3.0
License GPL
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