Soft Body Rope

Support Animation and Rigging
#1

Hello Everyone,

I need a rope lying randomly as if dropped onto the floor. I thought I would use soft bodies for the simulation, but I’m not getting the results I want. As you can see from the first pic, when the rope is dropped, it is twisting in a manner that makes it seem as though it is folding in on itself. The other 2 pics are the settings I am using for the soft body.

The plane I am dropping it onto is a simple deflector or collider.

Can anyone offer any suggestions as to what if any property I can tweak to prevent this twisting?

Thanks in advance!

Attachments




#2

Here is rope falling, maybe you can adapt it?

The twisting is what I call the zero crossing bug in blender. I discovered this months ago when trying to animatex along a curve. It would simply flip over as it passed by a vertex. You could try “unwinding” the offending vertex, but, like an old style phone cord, it will probably just twist up at the next vertex. Try CTRL-T on the twisted vertex.

Attachments

rope.blend (125 KB)

#3

Atom,

Thanks, I’ll take a look tonight. In the meantime, I had another thought regarding this. Instead of closing the rope only at the ends, what would happen if I closed each segment? So the mesh would be made of several closed volumes. I’m quite sure it would greatly increase the solve time, but it might give the results.

Thanks again!

#4

Atom,

Thanks for the blend file. This has been an education. I had been laboring under the assumption that I needed to use a mesh object for soft body simulation. The results are much better with a curve, even when it does go a bit haywire.

I have been playing with your example, and find I can get a bt less haywire if I lower the resolution of the curve, and use a bezier circle for the bevel object.

I will no doubt be using you example in the final project.

Thanks again!