Help Best method for multiple similar ropes?

[josemendez]

I'm having good results, but have been unable to get multiple ropes to work as desired. I can copy a rope any number of times, but editing the spline will reflect the changes to all other ropes that it was copied from.

Hi!

Yes, this is the intended behavior: blueprints are containers for particles and constraints, that define how an actor (in this case a rope) looks. Two ropes sharing the same blueprint will be identical, if you modify one of them, all ropes sharing the same blueprint will change. Same for cloth, softbodies, etc. See:http://obi.virtualmethodstudio.com/manual/6.3/ropesetup.html

When editing a path, you're modifying the rope's blueprint. Modifications will be applied to all ropes/rods sharing the same blueprint. This can speed up the workflow a lot, but can also destroy previous work if you're not careful! If you want to use an existing blueprint as a base to create a new one, duplicate it.

If I create a new rope with a new blueprint, it appears to work, but when running any obi particle attachments are seemingly ignored, and the rope will fall through the scene and cause everything to explode.

Make sure that the attachments reference the new control points. Even if their names are the same, the actual particles being referenced may change  if you move the control points around. In this case the attachment will be ignored and an error message will appear in the console.

If you duplicate the rope together with its attachment components and then set a new blueprint, make sure you select the new control points in the attachments, even if they keep the same names since they're still referencing the control points in the old blueprint.

Essentially I want multiple ropes that have identical blueprints/solvers, but varying lengths and positions.

Ropes having identical blueprints will be identical at startup. You can later change their length using cursors, but that's all that's allowed.

Keep in mind that for cloth and ropes to interact with each other, they all have to be included in the same solver. Having one solver per rope won't work in this case.

kind regards