Help Mocking a bundle of cables

[josemendez]

The issue I am running into is it is difficult to get the control points in the right position/orientation without making a mess since these bundles are not right at the origin and not on a main coordinate axis so the global controls take a lot of manipulating to achieve the desired initial state (I think I'm missing a fundamental blueprint usage concept or something... seems like maybe I should be making my blueprint around the origin and then translating/rotating a parent transform to place that instance in the scene instead maybe? As it is I am putting the rope actor at the origin and then adjusting the control points to be in the specific location which is kinda far from the origin).

Thank you,
Adam

Hi Adam,

Control points are expressed in the rope's local space. If you move a control point to the rope's local zero, and then move the rope around, the control point position and the rope position in world space will be the same (hope this makes sense!).

Latest Obi version (6.4) exposes numerical position and tangent fields for each control point, which means you can precisely place blueprint control points instead of eyeballing them or tweaking by hand (see: http://obi.virtualmethodstudio.com/forum...-3297.html). If this is not enough, maybe a writing a procedural placement system would be a better approach? This would allow you to set points programmatically.

You mentioned skeletons, so I think that I need to understand a totally different way to achieve what I'm doing.

I suggested Bill to use skeletons (or more generally, linear blend skinning) as a way to cheaply simulate and render a bunch of cables that are tightly bundled together. Since each individual cable won't have much impact on overall behavior of the whole bundle, it's simpler to approximate the entire thing as a very thick cable. I don't know if this would be beneficial in your case, as it depends on how "rogue" each cable can get.

However, that's not the biggest problem I am encountering (but likely contributing?), I was able to get a cable modeled as rod to attach and solve for it's position well even with some motion (start and end connector groups moving relative to each other and end particles static attached) but when I attempt to enable the dynamic attachment and then enable the connector rigidbody that the rod is attached to at the top end to simulate that connector disconnecting and falling due to gravity I am struggling to contain the wild constraint battles that ensue. I would like some guidance on what approach you would take to setup this scenario. I have tried to use appropriate masses and make sure that particles are not conflicting with colliders, but still I think I'm doing plenty wrong and appreciate your advice!

Constraint "battles" (if the behavior you're getting is really that) are always caused by constraints trying to enforce mutually incompatible conditions. When dealing with attachments this is almost always due to a particle that's attached inside a collider: the collider tries to push the particle outside, and the attachment tries to place it back inside. Filtering out collisions is the way to go in these cases.

If you could give more details about your setup I will be able to provide further guidance. let me know how can I help!

kind regards,