JENGA

Randomly decided to play with rigid body simulations for fun. Took out a few blocks from the middle and let it tumble.

The setup:

And some stills from the render:

I did run into some problems as this went along though. The main issue I had was actually with motion blur during the render. Setting the value of blur to 2 made things crazy blurry, but 1.999 would make everything disappear.

Apparently, motion blur in Blender 2.71 has issues with rigid body simulations and motion blur. Interesting since it wasn’t an issue in previous releases. I hope it’s a bug they fix soon.

But, a quick stint on Blender Artists led me to bake the simulation to key frames and viola! Perfection:

 

 

I don’t have a GPU, and since I used Cycles for this that made render times really slow. ~8-14 seconds per frame. Add up 300 frames and it took a looooong time, especially rendering only at night.  But hey! It’s pretty. Pointless. But pretty.