Rigid Bodies

There is a scene in my animation where lots of apples fall down onto my dragons head. I thought that the easiest way to do this would be using rigid bodies as this would automate the falling and create a natural look. Selecting the apple, and creating an active rigid body, this would allow the object to move once a gravity field was applied to it. In order to stop it from passing through the floor I had to make sure that my ground plane had a passive rigid body. There were a few issues that I came across which ultimately led to me not using rigid bodies, instead I key-framed each individual apple.

The first issue I came across was that the apple, once it hit the floor it would roll continuously and not stop. I needed the apples to hit the floor, bounce and roll to a stop. Normally in order to stop the rolling the static and dynamic friction needed to be changed, a value of 0 allows the rigid body to move, yet a value of 1 stops movement.. Even though I changed the values to 1, it didn't seem to work and the rolling carried on. The other issue that occurred was that the apples needed to hit the dragon on the head. I thought that creating a passive rigid body on the dragon would work, however it wouldn't allow me to do this. I'm not sure if this was because my dragon was a referenced file, and any changes would have needed to be applied to the original file. I didn't have the time to spend too much time trying to figure out the issues, instead I went ahead with keyframing each apple. This way allowed me to have more control over each apple and the rate in which they fell and where they fell. It took longer but I think the result turned out okay and believable, which is the main thing.