So I’ve had a bit of trouble figuring this one out. I’m not that well acquainted with Blender but it’s been fun getting into it.
I’m working on a mechanical animation involving both pulleys and a rope snap. It’s a model of an equalizer system within a large crane, so it’s not actually what’s lifting the load but what’s stabilizing it if I understand correctly. There are three lengths of cable involved - basically two ends and a middle all connected by two sockets. Here’s what I need to show (first two animated already):
Equalizer shifts one way…
First rope snaps (out of bounds of this animation) and EQ begins sliding the other way very fast
Connector slams into wheel and then both connectors break apart.
My theory was to do the basic moves and the rope snap separately and swap the two models at the moment of the break to make it easier to animate both. In other words use the best tools for just sliding ropes through pulleys then swap to a system where I can use the best tools to animate/simulate a snapping rope.
I’ve got the bit where the ropes just slide around nicely done, that was easy. But I’m stuck on the rope snap. Anyone got any advice? Or even better, could someone upload a .blend illustrating a way to animate snapping rope?
I can upload what I have now if it’s necessary, it was too big to upload as part of this post.
All I can offer is that you may want to create it in three parts. Essentially the final parts. Then bind the rope/cables together using a constraint. Then you can animate the influence of the constraint when the break occurs. I am at a loss at how to achieve that “snapping” action on the rope, however. Other than just hand animating it.
How do you have the cables setup now? Are you using softbodies on a curve?
Here are some files to check out. The constraints BLEND files, you need to press the P-Key while your mouse is over the 3D window to activate the physics demo.
Here is one more I cobbled together. This one uses a dynamic simulation to drive one end of a cable. But it also constrains that end to a fixed object until a certain point is reached in the animation.
Thanks for the help. Those .blends were helpful, although I’m still wondering how to snap the rope haha. It seems that it’s harder than it sounds.
I attached what I have right now. It’s basically 3 arrayed cylinders with curve deforms, all linked to an empty which I animate to slide them all together. Then the sockets, or connectors, are separately animated along another curve.
It would probably make more sense to use a bevel object instead of a arrayed cylinder, am I right?
How might I go about hand animating the snap? Would that involve armatures and a identical mesh to the curve objects or is there an easier way?
