Physic Materials - Unity Official Tutorials

Physic Materials are materials that instead

of effecting the appearance of a game object

they effect the way that the object reacts

to the physics engine. Consider the difference

between how a basketball and a bowling ball

might bounce. Whilst there is a difference

in their mass, their surfaces are also

very different and they react to other

surfaces very differently. Physic materials

can be created from the Create button

on the project panel.

And they're edited in the inspector to

control how the surface reacts to another

surface. They do this by controlling friction.

Dynamic Friction is how much friction

exists whilst the object is moving

and Static Friction is how much

force is required in order to move the

object from a static position.

Bounciness does exactly what it sounds like.

It controls how bouncy the object is.

And the Friction Combine settings control

how they respond to another object

with a certain material. Friction Direction

will allow you to control friction

in a particular axis and the dynamic

and static friction 2 properties

will give you control over those three axes.

In this example we've applied this

particular physic material to our power cube

and our work bench.

The physic material is applied to the

collider in any given game object

and you can see that there's a slot for

material within the collider settings.

You can see that if I press play,

it bounces slightly and is also very slippery.

This is because I've used 0 for dynamic

and static friction, meaning there's nothing

stopping it from slipping around and

I've also made it slightly bouncy.

If I make it very bouncy

then it's going to bounce off of the table.

And for example if I wanted to restrict

it's movement in a particular axis

so I can see that the X axis is the direction

in which it's sliding, so what I could do

is go back to that material and I'll set

my friction direction of X to 1 and

increase the dynamic friction. I'm going to turn

bounciness back down to a lower number

so that it doesn't bounce off the table.

And you can see that it's slowing to a halt

because of the amount of friction involved there.

So we could make that slightly lower

and you can see it begins to slide.

So hopefully you can see that with

physic materials you can completely control

the surface of an object

and how it responds to others.