Animate Rigid Bodies Interacting at Intervals

[nick-scholtes]

I've found myself needing to do some scripting that is above my head.
I need to create a simple script to drop a ball on a flat plate and then drop another ball on to the same flat plate 1 second later. But I need to keyframe the transparency, Rigid Body Active on/off, Collision Layers, and several other Channel Box parameters. One ball falls, then later the second one appears, and falls. Eventually there would be 5 objects doing this, and selectively interact only certain objects.

The trouble is, I'm a noob with scripting and python. Would someone be able to work me through this? If it's easier to do in MEL, that would work, too.

Thanks!

[joojaa]

Why would you need scripting for this? See the thing is if you can not do it manually then you can not do it with scripting. So youd only script thing that you know how to do but doing it manually would take too long.

In this case you dont really need a script, all you need to do is key all the same way and then shif their keying (dope sheet editor). I mean 50 objects ok you need a script maybe 5 not really. Or then your not describing your intent properly.

[nick-scholtes]

Hi Joojaa,

Thank you for your reply. That clarifies things. I'll try it again the manual way.

[dpmpls]

Okay, I have an update. It looks like this is for 1000 objects, instead of only 4 or 5. So it would, in fact, need to be scripted. As I said, I'm a total noob with Python and scripting so I would greatly appreciate any help

Thanks

[dpmpls]

I hate to be a pest, but I could really use some help, if anyone has a moment.