Improving collisions and self collisions

[josemendez]

I dont need a rigid cylinder, but I got your point  


In fact, what I'm trying to do is to simulate something like an wire winding, as many layers as possible. Naturally, the lower layers must be able to support the upper ones. That's why I need to avoid missing self-collisions, otherwise it's gonna be a mess  

Something like that:



Due to that fact, is it possible change the spheric collider inside the rope for the capsule one? It would fill the gaps between the particles without needing to increase its amount.



These shape-matching constraints will be extremely usefull in my project if I were able to freeze parts of the rope in order to relieve the processing. Can't wait to use it  



Hi! I don't know what stiffness do you need, however here I'm using res 0.5 and 100 bending iterations and it became stiffy enough for my purposes 

Hi!

Using self-collisions for this is a dead-end, as you might have discovered by now. It's just too many collisions happening at once, and lot of wasted performance just for keeping the rope coiled in place.

Also, particles are inherently spherical (that's what makes them so fast compared to regular colliders, as they are just a <position,radius> pair. They have no rotation information, therefore no quaternions or matrices involved in their simulation). They cannot be made into capsules or any other shape, as that would require to add a quaternion to express their rotation, a 3x3 matrix to represent their inertia tensor, etc... at that point we would be back to regular, unstable rigidbodies.

A much better approach to this would be to represent the coil itself with a static mesh. Append mesh vertices to it when the rope shortens, and remove vertices from it when the rope increases its lenght. This way maintaining the coil takes virtually 0 performance and you're only simulating the "free" end.