For a project I need a couple of chain animations but the hard part is that sometimes the accelerations are big. This causes the chain (rigid bodys) to ‘break’. I’ve tried upping the steps and ilerations but does not help much.
Also tried something with a curve and soft bodies but can’t get it so that the curve will not extend beyond it’s innitial length. Otherwise it wil make the chain longer and shorter at times.
Also hard to get good results.
Maybe you guys have some tips on how to approach this?
I would say, are you sure you need physics on your chain links? Especially during periods of high velocity? If you know where you want your links to be, they don’t need physics. And things with physics don’t need to use their physics at all frames.
I would also say, don’t rely on mesh colliders to hold things together. If you can get away with it, and you probably can, use non-rendering proxies, with rigid body constraints to hold them within certain limits, then parent your rendering links to those proxies.
There are a number of ways to use a curve and control the length, but they all come with loss of control over one end of the curve. I don’t know if that’s important to you (can’t really visualize what you’re trying to do.) A string of verts of a given length, given a curve modifier, only extends a fixed distance along that curve. Same with a string of spline IK bones.with Y stretch disabled. These can be used to keep track of a fixed-length section of a curve if you want.
I’ve got an animation with a robot arm with chains on it. The chains are attached to the robotarm and a wall. When the robotarm moves the chains need to move naturally. I though with phfysics it would do the trick but it seems to be to hard that way.
Never used rigid body constraints. Did a quick google but haven’t found a good tutorial yet.
Thx for the reply!
is easier. Not as nice results, but might be good enough for you. Bones are set up with spline IK, no stretch, which limits the length of the chain. Follows the physics, which is nice to know.
