Alright, let me tell you about getting this darn cube to just sit still. It sounds simple, right? Just a block sitting there. But man, sometimes the easy stuff trips you up.
Getting it in There
So, I needed a basic cube for this scene I was messing with. Nothing fancy, just a plain old cube on a flat surface. Dropped it in using the usual tools, slapped a physics component on it. Thought that’d be it. Job done, move on.
The Wobbly Nightmare
Yeah, no. It wasn’t that easy. The thing just wouldn’t settle properly. It looked okay at first, but then it would do this tiny little wobble. Sometimes it would even slowly, almost magically, tip over after a few seconds. Drove me nuts. It wasn’t supposed to be complicated physics, it just needed to sit there like a normal, boring block.
I started poking around the settings. Here’s kinda what I went through:
- First, I thought, maybe it’s too light? So I cranked up the mass. Nope, still wobbly.
- Okay, maybe friction? I made a new physics material, pushed the friction sliders way up, both static and dynamic. Still doing its little dance.
- What about drag? Increased the linear drag, increased the angular drag (the spinny resistance stuff). It slowed the wobble down, maybe? But didn’t fix it. It just looked like it was wobbling in slow motion.
- I double-checked the ground, made sure it was perfectly flat. It was. Checked the cube’s collider shape. Just a standard box. Nothing weird.
- At one point, I genuinely thought maybe the physics engine itself was just having a bad day. You know, sometimes things just get glitchy. Restarted everything. Same problem.
Honestly, I was getting properly annoyed. Felt like I was trying to balance a plate on a needle. Spent way longer on this than I should have, probably a whole afternoon just staring at this cube refusing to be stable.
The “Aha!” Moment (Finally)
Took a break, grabbed a coffee. Stared out the window for a bit. Came back and thought, maybe I’m fighting the physics too much. What if the center of gravity is too perfect? Like, perfectly centered makes it easy to tip?
So, I went back into the settings for the cube’s physics body. Found the center of mass setting. It was just at the default (0, 0, 0), right in the middle. I nudged the Y-value down just a tiny, tiny bit. Like, almost nothing. Just lowered the center of mass slightly towards the base.
And I also went back to that angular drag. I’d increased it before, but this time I pushed it up quite a bit higher than felt ‘realistic’. Figured, who cares about realistic if it just stops the wobble?
Peace at Last
Hit play. And waited. The cube dropped, settled… and just sat there. Perfectly still. No wobble, no slow tip-over. It just sat. I poked it gently with another object, and it slid a bit, then settled right back down. Solid.
Felt kinda silly it took lowering the center of mass almost imperceptibly and whacking up the angular drag to fix it, but hey, it worked. Sometimes you just gotta nudge things in a slightly unnatural way to get the result you want, especially with computer physics.
So yeah, that was my adventure with the surprisingly unstable cube. Glad it’s sorted now. On to the next thing!
