What is the Center of Mass Add-on?

The Blender Center of Mass Add-on is a powerful tool designed to enhance your animation workflow by accurately calculating the center of mass for any character or object. Perfect for animators and game developers, this add-on ensures your characters stay balanced and grounded, bringing a new level of realism to your projects.

Key Features

• Automatic Center of Mass Calculation: Instantly calculate the center of mass for any rigged character or object and project it onto the floor plane
• Dynamic Mass Distribution: Easily assign and adjust masses to bones or objects based on realistic human body mass distributions, allowing for dynamic tweaking
• Multiple Centers of Mass: Create and manage multiple centers of mass for different objects or characters within a single scene
• Balance Visualization: Visualize the area between points of contact (e.g., feet) to see if the character is balanced or likely to fall
• Customizable Settings: Tweak masses and visualization parameters to fit your specific needs, ensuring perfect balance in your animations

How it Works

1. Setup:
   • Open Blender and go to the pose mode of your character
   • Select the bones to which you want to add the masses and click "Add masses to selected objects/bones" to assign mass values
2. Adjust Mass Distribution:
   • Use a predefined human body mass distribution or tweak masses dynamically for each bone
   • For additional objects (e.g., an axe), create an extra bone at the object's center of mass and assign a mass value
3. Visualize Balance:
   • In Edit mode, select the vertices representing points of contact and click the "plus" button to visualize the area between them
   • Adjust the color and settings to your preference
4. Analyze Movement:
   • Play the animation and observe the center of mass projection. Ensure it stays within the contact area to maintain balance

How to Install

The installation procedure is the same as for other Blender add-ons:

1. Go to Edit > Preferences... > Add-ons
2. Click Install...
3. Select the downloaded .zip archive center_of_mass.zip
4. Click the check box to activate the add-on

Congratulations! You now have a robust tool to ensure your characters' movements are physically accurate and visually stunning. Transform your animation process with the Blender Center of Mass Add-on and create more realistic, physically correct animations effortlessly