Gyroscope simulation created in Blender

Описание: I took a bit of time yesterday to experiment with the physics engine in Blender. Here is a render of a spinning gyroscope created in Cycles. The model includes active rigid bodies of the gyroscope frame and rotor, and a passive rigid body for a contact surface with the ground. A hinge and motor define the interaction between the frame and rotor.

*The good*
Actual spinning-top physics seem to be reproduced:
The gyro initially falls over because the rotor hasn't spun up
Later it rights itself when it is spinning at sufficiently high rate, and its base has stuck to the contact surface
Procession about the vertical axis begins
Beautiful renders as always, with physically realistic surfaces and reflections
Fairly easy to implement contact and a single hinge joint

*The bad*
Not really an engineering tool:
Units are a bit ambiguous in spots, like friction or damping when you can seemingly control "a little or a lot" but with no clear documentation of what that means in physical dimensions
You can't control moments of inertia
Limited solver settings, and not in standard engineering terms like error tolerance
Cycles render times can be painfully slow, particularly on my Macbook Air M2 and after upgrading to Blender 4.3.2

Obviously I wouldn't really use Blender in a real-world engineering application (at least, not out-of-the-box, I'm sure there are third party add-ons). But, its cool to see that it is producing phenomena that are generally correct, at least on some level, even if not necessarily precise.

The gyro asset, by the way, is one I'm planning to add to my ER3D project (coming soon). You can check out progress on github https://github.com/radcli14/er3d .