[Brian Jones]

take a landscape, turn off borders at sea level, make it editable, in poly mode select all polys and choose Triangulate. Then do an Inner Extrude with Preserve Groups turned off. Next, right-click and choose Split. Hide the original landscape and select the new object (with only the inner polys) and then do an Extrude.

[Brian Jones]

this looks like Gabriels’ thread from a couple days ago, can you post the scene file?

[Brian Jones]

as soon as you add a rigid body tag the dynamics takes over and it ignores animation or parent/child relationships. Follow Position and Follow Rotation (Force tab) are one way to get it to follow it’s normal place or follow the dynamics. Keep them at 100 until you want the cog to start being dynamic. Or if you want the cog to go ‘all at once’ rather than do Follow Position from 100 – 0 in one frame you you could just have Dynamic (Dynamics tab) set to Off then keyframe it to On when you want the cog to release.

[Brian Jones]

I’ve never had a problem with upload here, you just have to follow the steps and copy the link they give you at the end and paste it back into the post (which should be automatic I agree) or otherwise people use a number of sharing services or a dropbox or google drive link etc.

[Brian Jones]

I’m going to have to see your scene file. You have something going on that is not right in your example clip. Spheres are moving backward after the broom has raised above them – it might be the spheres are piling up and simply rolling off the pile but I’d need to see the actual setup.

As to spheres – they look like marbles or ball bearings on a perfectly smooth surface would in reality with a broom pushing them around, so the dynamics system is doing a good job and you are trying to push the settings around until they don’t act like the spheres they are and you might not be able to do that. It might be possible to get the settings right (I’d have to see the file) but I’d try cubes (or something close), they would move like you want with just friction I think. Or if you have to have spheres try using cubes as the dynamic element but place a sphere inside that as a child

[Brian Jones]

yeah didn’t think friction would do much since they are rolling which is why angular damping should work, how high did you get the angular? Otherwise maybe Follow Rotation/Position, even drag… And you can reduce the energy in the first place by reducing Bounce in the broom and spheres.

[Brian Jones]

increase friction in the spheres and ground (but being spheres that will only help some) the best is probably to increase Angular Damping (particularly) and Linear Damping in the Force tab of the dynamics tag

[Brian Jones]

I would make a cube the size you want, make it editable, go to Edge Mode, then select the upright edges at the corners and do a Bevel (probably with Limit checked). You just have to watch where the bevels meet (you can see it in one of the images) there will be doubled vertexes there, if they are close enough together you can do an Optimize or you can leave them apart when you bevel (don’t bevel until they meet) or Weld the doubled points by hand if the optimize doesn’t work.

[Brian Jones]

your version of R17 is the same as mine (17.055) so no difference there. The graphics drivers shouldn’t affect rendering and while sometimes there is a difference in the viewport and picture viewer they are usually not light brightness…
Maybe try rendering with only one light at a time to see if there is a difference with all lights or only one (or some). (I like the look of Light and Light.3 by themselves for what it’s worth)

[Brian Jones]

I am not seeing this. I rendered in the viewport and to the picture viewer in both R17 and R18 and the images have the same brightness in all 4 images.