I have a character that will perform various jumping rope tricks. First, she will drag the jumping rope across the ground, stop at the center of the camera view, and start performing. The problem is I don’t how to achieve a realistic yet easy to control rope animation (especially on the “dragging” part). So far, I have tried two kinds of methods:
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The manual bone rig. As the name suggests, it hooks a Bezier Curve with IK bones and I do the positioning manually. This method doesn’t seem to be problematic once the character start spinning it around, but I can’t drag the rope realistically this way.
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The simulation. I converted the Bezier Curve into a mesh and applied Cloth physics into it. I hooked each end of the rope into empties, parented the empties to 2 bones, and viola! I can drag the rope across the ground. But, two more problems appear. a) I can’t swing the rope above the character easily since I don’t have control. b) Somehow, when I move the bones to fit the character’s initial pose and press Play from the 1st frame, the rope expands and sometimes, swing unnaturally hard. I don’t know why.
I have been thinking of combining those two methods above. I’ll let the simulation take control while the dragging part occurs, and then override it with manual rig when it starts swinging. But, I don’t have a clue how. Or are there any other methods of animating a jumping rope realistically? Please let me know.
Here is the .blend file with two kinds of rope. One rope with IK bones, and one rope with simulation.
PROP_Rope.blend (4.7 MB)
