23-12-2022, 02:31 PM
Hi Jose,
Thanks for your quick and extensive reply, much appreciated!
Reading your reply I feel like we have to adjust our expectations of how to use Unity for engineering solutions indeed.
The initial request of the team was to visualize how the cable would swing around certain equipment in the area to check if the max available length of the cable would be sufficient.
But engineers being engineers, a ton of additional information of the cable got shared and requested to be incorporated haha.
I did this by roughly drawing the cables-path with the EditPath, and creating some slack in areas where I want it to be.
Since I don't exactly know how the cable will behave (stretching/compressing) I thought the following would be sufficient to visualize if the length would be okay:
• Draw a cable path with slack in it
• Try to disable any stretching/compression
• Animate the rotation of the crane
• Visually check if the slack (created in its resting position) is enough to bridge the distance of the crane moving.
To check how this movement of the crane affects the cable length I check the values of
• rope.CalculateLength();
• rope.restLength;
The cable extends quite a bit (CalculateLenght in relation to restLength), but I would have expected that, if the cable can't stretch, the movement of the crane would slide the cable over the cable-saddles and reduce the slack in the cable. Yet this only happens to a certain extend. The restLength is 127m whilst the calculateLength() at the end of the crane movement is about 142m, but there is more then enough slack still in the cable.
As you can see I'm struggling on what work method to use to check the approximate length of the cable that we need to do the crane movement.
An example of a Cable Saddle can be found on the link.
Again, thanks for your quick reply!
Kind regards.
Thanks for your quick and extensive reply, much appreciated!
Reading your reply I feel like we have to adjust our expectations of how to use Unity for engineering solutions indeed.
The initial request of the team was to visualize how the cable would swing around certain equipment in the area to check if the max available length of the cable would be sufficient.
But engineers being engineers, a ton of additional information of the cable got shared and requested to be incorporated haha.
I did this by roughly drawing the cables-path with the EditPath, and creating some slack in areas where I want it to be.
Since I don't exactly know how the cable will behave (stretching/compressing) I thought the following would be sufficient to visualize if the length would be okay:
• Draw a cable path with slack in it
• Try to disable any stretching/compression
• Animate the rotation of the crane
• Visually check if the slack (created in its resting position) is enough to bridge the distance of the crane moving.
To check how this movement of the crane affects the cable length I check the values of
• rope.CalculateLength();
• rope.restLength;
The cable extends quite a bit (CalculateLenght in relation to restLength), but I would have expected that, if the cable can't stretch, the movement of the crane would slide the cable over the cable-saddles and reduce the slack in the cable. Yet this only happens to a certain extend. The restLength is 127m whilst the calculateLength() at the end of the crane movement is about 142m, but there is more then enough slack still in the cable.
As you can see I'm struggling on what work method to use to check the approximate length of the cable that we need to do the crane movement.
An example of a Cable Saddle can be found on the link.
Again, thanks for your quick reply!
Kind regards.