Create a falling cube animation with Blender Physics

This tutorial presumes you know how to navigate around in 3d space within blender, and create, select, and move objects. If you don't know how to do these things have a look at the "Blender crash course" here

To view an example movie of what you will be creating click here

Lets get started...

Create a scene using 10 cubes, (Hint: select a cube and Shift+D to duplicate it). Ensure none of the cubes touch.

Add a large plane below the scene, something like this:

At the top of your blender window, change the rendering engine from "Blender Render" to "Blender Game"

Select one of your cubes and go into the physics panel:

Turn the cube into a rigid body:

Finally, a little further down tick "Collision Bounds" and set "Box" as the shape of the collision boundary

Repeat this process for all 10 of your cubes (leave the plane object untouched)

Under the game menu, tick "Record Animation":

Press P on your keyboard to start the physics simulation, the cubes will calculate to fall to the ground and bounce. Once the simulation has finished press Esc to stop.

Change your Render Engine back to "Blender Render":

That's about it! With the mouse sitting inside your 3d viewport, press Alt+A to play the animation. You should see the cubes falling to the ground as before.

Add some coloured lights for interest then render out a movie of your animation! Instructions on how to render movies can be found here.

For a nicer looking ground plane check out this video

Happy blending!

Raph.