blender 2.

66a Rigid Body Animation

Lets desing a simple scene containing some torus and connect them with each other to make a free moving chain by gravity. We used to use Blender Game Engine to simulate a physics motion and record it to use in rendering. Now, we have a powerful feature Rigid Body Tool embedded in 2.66a version.

1) Add a torus and make it smooth:

2) You can duplicate it and rotate by 90 degrees in x axis:

3) You can continue as much as in this way to make a longer chain, rename them from the properties panel:

4) Now lets select the Torus1 and click Add Passive.

5) Second and the rest will be Active rigid body (Ctrl-R shortcut is helpful):

6) When you press Alt-A for animation, you will see them they are exploding

7) Go to the first frame (Shift-Left Arrow), and lets give each active torus contsraints to connect the previous torus:

8) Lets look closer to the physics panel and change some values like this image:

Selected Torus2 has a Hinge value and Object 1 is Torus1, Object 2 is Torus2 itself.

9) Do this 8th step till the last torus. And press Alt-A again!

10) Give some materials and background to render the animation with cycles or blender internal render! For repeating actions you can use F3 menu shortcut to recall that command. You can also use Point instead of Hinge For very slow animations you can use baking Rigid Body Cache placed in Scene panel

Here is my animation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJW1EPEgMVo