rope vs cloth

[dswigger]

Ropes do not model torsion, which means your belt would be free to rotate around its longitudinal axis. You could use rods instead, which do model torsion. But either ropes or rods would approximate the belt as a cylinder, which for collision detection is not really accurate.

I'd use cloth for this. Make sure to use enough substeps to reach the desired stiffness, then increase bending compliance (or deactivate bend constraints entirely) so that it is flexible enough.

Thanks!  I played around with ropes and observed exactly as you stated.  Next steps are playing with cloth to figure out how to do what I want.  When you say substeps - can you elaborate?