A couple of years ago I attended SIGGRAPH remotely, and there was a CGI animated film called "Tresor" (Treasure). The story involved sailors on a boat trying to retrieve a sunken treasure and included a winch, gold coins in a pile, an octopus holding things with his arms, and other things that had pretty complex physics of objects interacting with each other.
So I was wondering, who works on libraries for the physics of stuff like that? It's non-trivial! Are things like this available for Blender? I tried and failed once to animate an octopus reaching out and grabbing something, and I envy the people who succeeded.
Hi Erik eerikitect
That's probably (but what do I know) not physics, but animation and I remember Hjalti talking about this in the Blender Conference 2015: "the pain of animation": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEJFAsbzcmk
specifically the section about the rope, starting at ~20:56.
A 'mountain' of coins will probably be done with physics, see: the Treasure Chest course:
https://cgcookie.com/lessons/dropping-coins-with-rigid-body-physics
And a stack of books, for instance is likely carefully being placed one by one.
I've wondered stuff like this all the time, only to see a behind the scenes on something or listen to a podcast or maybe the Corridor guys, and to realize that it was painstakingly animated, and I'm like oh boy, it's a hard job for sure. I would often thought that they automate everything, make the most super complex things so they have flexibility for changing stuff around, and at times they do, but the crazy tight schedules of productions often have people scattered around running hacking things together however they can. Now this is me just talking out of what I have seen out there, I don't have much studio production experience. I have worked on several productions here and there, but not a deep dive, and I hate when I see the reality behind all the stress and making a production and then when you see interviews, people just tell stories as if it was a smooth sail. Something about human psychology that makes us want to make things seem prettier than they actually are. Like the social media effect.