Tutorial: How to make character-marbles for marble-races

[Drachenbauer]

Hello

If you want to turn the simpla marbles in your marble-race into funny characters, you may think, that you just have to apply a picture of your character to the circle of the morble.
But some character may look too small, if you want to fit them compleetely into the circle (because they have linbs or other stuff, that sticks out of their round body) and their rolling on ramps look unrealistic like hovering a bit above the edge.

Here is a way to manage this better:

i. Get a Marble-race-building pack from Algobox (some users made good stuff for this : for sample MarbleRaced) and take some of the marbles from there in the components-folder (red car icon on the folder) to get them into your own scene (or draw a circle with r:0.25m and add a light-tracer to it).

2. Find a picture of a character you want to use (compact round characters like Kirby or the Angry Birds may look good as marbles, because rolling will look realistic for them), with clear background.

3. Reesize the character-picture to a perfect square (without scaling the character it self)

4. Add a square (rectangle tool) ontop of your marble and use your character as texture for it (don´t forget to remove the square-outline).

5. resize the square, that the body of your character fits in the circle of the marble (some details like linbs or feathers can stick out of the circle

6. "glue" the square with the caracter onto the marble and make the circle invisible (maybe shrink the light-tracker abit to keep it hidden behind the character)

7. make the color of the light-tracer match the color of the character

8. select the square and set it´s density to 0.0100 (value of the air in theese simulations) and remove it from all collision-groups (this step removes most physics-effects, that the square normally will add to the marble)

9. save your edited marbles as a component again to have them by your hand for building your marble-races.

With this method you wil get the effect, that limbs and stuff of your character can overlap the edges of the course and the rolling looks not more like hovering.
And the whoole character is bigger and easyer to follow with the virtual camera in the game.

Here is an Angry Birds marbles-set, i made this way:
http://www.algodoo.com/algobox/details.php?id=204857

p.S.
can you please move this to the tutorials-section of the forum and then remove this p.S. line?