Rigidbody Center of Mass

Unity Engine
1

Seems like a rigidbody’s center of mass is the center of the collider(s?) that are attached to a game object. Anyone else have info about this?

BTW, I just found in the forums you can set it through code (rigidbody.centerOfMass). But if you don’t do that, is my first paragraph correct?

2

It’s a bit more complicated than that, but often the centre of mass will be near the intuitive centre of the collider(s). What actually happens is that the physics engine treats the collider as if it were a solid block of uniformly dense material. It then uses that assumption to calculate where the real centre of mass would be. There are some objects (eg, an egg or an L shape) where the centre of mass isn’t where you might intuitively expect. There are also other objects (eg, cars) where the mass is very unevenly distributed, so the calculated position isn’t very accurate.

3

Thanks Andeeee! That’s what I’m experiencing:

I had a tall narrow vehicle with a box collider covering the whole thing. It kept tipping over. Once I shrunk the collider to be 1/4 the height of the mesh, and positioned it just above the ground at the bottom of the tall vehicle, the whole thing didn’t tip over anymore but could still bump into other colliders in the scene.