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Modeling a cable
I'm trying to model a semi-rigid cable...like an electrical snake or a very flexible rod. When pushed into the scene, the cable/rod deflects (snakes) around objects but will tend to be straight in the absence of a collision or an applied force. When force is removed, it should immediately return to a straight rod with little or no oscillations.
I’ve tried to create a model using a series of spheres and Configurable Joints, but I cannot find any settings that produce the stiffness needed. And the joints are not behaving how I expect. For example, if I set all six motion and angular motion settings to “fixed,” the series of spheres will still dance around like a chain if impacted.
Suggestions greatly appreciated.
Are you able to model in a program such as Blender? Because if you can, I would reccomend modeling a cable and adding I$$anonymous$$. Thus if one bone moves, the others would follow, while being stiff normally. You would just need to have force affect the rig.
It would be interesting to see what a string of SpringJoints would do.
@DaveA - I started with SprintJoints and moved on to ConfigurableJoints. After a couple of days of effort, I was unable to construct anything that was even approaching acceptable. Note the goal was a simulation of a real-world object, so the standards were higher than many game mechanics.
@sajidfarooq - The approach that was most promising before the project fell through was to use $$anonymous$$egaWorldPathDeform. I dynamically created and manipulated the path.
Answer by robertbu · Aug 03, 2013 at 02:43 AM
Thanks for the suggestion. We tried it and the results were not what we were looking for. The MegaShapes/MegaFiers along with some code got us closer, but the project fell through.
Answer by Sajidfarooq · Aug 18, 2013 at 09:52 PM
I was just going to suggest Megafiers when I saw your comment. Did you try the "bend" modifier? I am imagining you tried to manually figure out intersections and manipulate bend etc based on that?
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