Physics

Our current challenge: Making a marble roll down a ramp and launch into a stack of boxes. (Later to be a stack of duckies, probably.)

Some gotchas:

• Remember to set the Scene's Rigid Body Cache to equal the number of frames of your animation. Default is 250, if you extend that you have to change this as well.
• Active things are active, Passive things don't move. The ramp being Active allowed the marble to fall through it, which is... not optimal.
• Rolling seems to be a quality of friction. Too much friction on the ramp, though, equals slow-moving marble which doesn't launch. Ugh?
• Our current (as of 4/23) ramp has too much wiggle room, should look into raising & narrowing the "bumpers" along the sides to guide the marble.

Current "ramp" technique:

1. Start with a Path. (Add -> Curve -> Path)
2. Grab the bezier points and shape the path into the curved ramp we want.
3. Convert it to a mesh (Alt+C presumably).
4. Tab to Edit mode and E to extrude. We want a horizontal extrude for the travel surface followed by vertical to give the ramp some "structure."

(Hat tip to https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/5623/what-is-the-fastest-way-to-create-a-curved-plane for this solution.)