How to use Materials & Dynamic Physics with Reality Composer
With the free Reality Composer app for iPad and iPhone you can create your very own Augmented Reality (AR) experiences with relative ease. In this QuickTips tutorial I’ll teach you how to add properties to your objects to change the material they are made from, which in turn will affect how the physics simulations run in your Augmented Reality world.
By following this tutorial you’ll learn how to change materials in order to affect the physics in your scene, as well as understanding the difference between Fixed Physics and Dynamic Physics on your objects. Oh, and I’ll show you how the cool and very customisable Sign object works too.
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Did you know you can change the material of objects in Reality Composer which will affect how the physics simulation applies to them? Here’s how…
To start with I’ve made this simple scene using some 3D spheres and some signs.
You can add the signs in the normal way,
and you can actually customise these as well to change the text, the size, the colour – everything you could want.
I’ve then duplicated this to make sure I’ve got one for every material option available.
So at the moment these balls are just made of whatever material comes as default.
They don’t do anything and they don’t move if you tap onto one of them though, and scroll down to Physics, you can flick that switch on.
At this point this object can now interact with the world around it and you can see we’ve got some new options – so lets change the material and make sure it matches my sign.
This one is going to be concrete.
If I now press the Play button on the top toolbar, you’ll see your scene come to life except, well, you won’t yet – because that object is Fixed in place.
On that Physics screen tap on the word Fixed and choose Dynamic instead.
This way whatever gravity is in your scene will apply to that particular object.
Now if I press Play that ball should drop and hit the floor.
That’s perfect. Let’s now go down the line and tap on each object go onto Physics, switch it on, choose Dynamic and then change the material.
Phew! Quite a few steps.
We’ll do that for each one so we have the Ice, the Lead, the Plastic and all of the other materials there ready to go.
Then, when you go to the top and press the Play button you should see all of those balls dropping at the same time, due to Gravity, but they’ll be interacting with the group in different ways because of the materials we’ve chosen.
You can do all sorts of things, and it really is a great way of demonstrating Physics and Properties of Materials in your classroom using Augmented Reality on the iPad.
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