Physics animation not playing - stuck on certain frame

Support Particles and Physics Simulations
1

Hi good people.

I’m diving into blender animation for the first time (never done anything like it before) and made a “Wrecking Ball animation” by following a tutorial.

Now the same thing happened twice: I’ve fumbled about with the animation, run a few test renderings, change stuff around, make a little mistake in Edit Mode - DO NOT SAVE THE FILE BUT JUST CLOSE BLENDER - and afterwards the animation is “stuck” on a certain frame. Play Animation does nothing, the physics are not simulated, adding new objects or removing them does not change anything. I’ve done this twice now. :spin:
You can look at my files here:

WreckingBall.blend (3.91 MB)
WreckingBall001.blend (4.6 MB)

With the second one (0001) i am ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE that is was in a working state before i closed blender. The animation would run and i DID NOT SAVE before reloading it.

What am I doing wrong? Is this a bug? Are the files lost or can i recover from this?

Thanks in advance!

2

Opened WreckingBall001.blend
Changed start frame to 1
Go to frame 1 and pressed Play and animation plays correctly

Or

In Scene / Rigid Body Cache panel pressed Bake to save the animation.
Animation plays correctly from your starting frame of 60

Not bothered looking at WreckingBall.blend as most likely similar solution

3

That’s it. Thank you! :smiley:

4

just to clarify… so… in order for a physical simulation (rigid body) to process, you MUST play from the FIRST frame of your simulation (shown in the rigid body cache section of the “world” tab.)

note i, this isn’t always the start frame of the animation, depending on how you set up your rigid body world settings.
note ii, if in doubt, use the “bake rigid body world” option.