Making the first part of a rope rigid....

[UglyMug]

Hi all,

I'm fairly new to Obi Rope and I'm struggling with something that I hope someone has come across before.

I have my rope (which is actually an electrical cable) and the end control point is attached to a mesh of a 'plug'.  The end control point is just inside the plug mesh, and everything works, when I move the plug the cable is dragged with it.  However the cable rotates at the end point which clearly doesn't look natural.

What I need to do is have the first part of the cable, say 5cm (in a real world example), that sticks out from the back of the plug which is completely rigid (and follows the same orientation of the plug mesh).  Then I would need the cable to bend after that 5cm.

I'm assuming that I need to create a second control point 5cm along the cable.  I have experimented with attaching both these points to the plug mesh (Obi Particle Attachment) but I cant seem to get it to work.  Am I on the right lines?

I have added an image as a file attachment in the hopes of making my poor explanation clearer.

cheers and thanks in advance

Ian

[josemendez]

Hi Ian,

Since ropes do not model/simulate orientation (unlike rods), particles in them are simply points. So to control the orientation of a certain part of the rope, you need to attach at least 2 particles.

So yes, you're on the right track! Make sure that the second control point is far enough from the first one that it has its own particle. This can be verified by adding a ObiParticleRenderer component to visualize the particles. If both points are really close together, they will both refer to the same underlying particle and attaching them will have no effect on rope orientation.

let me know if you need further help.

(Edit: no images are attached to your post!)

[UglyMug]

Hi Ian,

Since ropes do not model/simulate orientation (unlike rods), particles in them are simply points. So to control the orientation of a certain part of the rope, you need to attach at least 2 particles.

So yes, you're on the right track! Make sure that the second control point is far enough from the first one that it has its own particle. This can be verified by adding a ObiParticleRenderer component to visualize the particles. If both points are really close together, they will both refer to the same underlying particle and attaching them will have no effect on rope orientation.

let me know if you need further help.

(Edit: no images are attached to your post!)

HI, and thanks for the quick reply.

Yes, moving the points further apart and/or increasing the particle density fixed it for me, many thanks.

This has led me on to another question though,  I'll raise it as a new question as it does not relate directly to the title of this post
Thanks again