Ping Pong Ball Physics

Unity Engine
1

Hi, folks!

So I’m fairly new to Unity and trying to create a ping-pong ball that bounces/rolls realistically on a tabletop surface. I’ve created a sphere, attached a sphere collider, bouncy physics material and rigidbody, but no matter how I tweak the settings, the ball always feels more like a tiny beach ball than a light, plastic ping-pong ball. The hang time is far too long, and the ball bounces up and down at a slow pace–again, it behaves like a beach ball. Its scale is 1x1x1 and its mass is 1, but decreasing/increasing either of these things, even to the real-world proportions of a ping-pong ball, doesn’t seem to do much in the way of making my ball more ping-pong-y.

The only solution I can think of is to increase gravity for the scene, but that feels dirty and like it could be problematic down the road. So I have come to you, oh wise Unity sages, for help.

Thanks in advance,

  • CA
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2

The thing with mass is relativity - something interacting with something else that’s half the mass. The actual values matter less than the difference between mass.

You could toy with the time scale for making things bounce/settle faster, but you’d need to figure that into calculations for everything else (i.e. create MyTime.deltaTime and use that instead of Time.deltaTime - just update the value it returns once per frame before anything else, that being Time.deltaTime multiplied/divided by whatever factor you’ve chosen to get 1:1 time scale for everything except physics). There might be an easier way… just thought of that approach now.

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