Pipeline that bends

[josemendez]

- Ive got a long steel pipeline 100m+ that lays on a beach. (for now modeled as a cylinder with nothing fancy)

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Ive been trying to do this with SoftBody but I cant seem to get it to work properly.

Hi Patrick,

ObiSoftbody is quite likely not the right tool for this. The reason is it's designed to simulate volumetric objects that are roughly the same size along all axis. The way it generates a particle-based representation of the object is it first voxelizes it, that is, turn it into small blocks called voxels. Then it generates one particle per voxel, and connects it to particles in the neighbor voxels.

The size of each voxels is determined using the longest axis of the object's bounding box, which in your case is at least x100 longer than the other 2 axis. This is causing the softbody to be composed of a single, long row of voxels - with one particle in each one.

You could use vertex-based surface sampling instead of voxel-based, in the blueprint settings. This would yield roughly one particle per vertex, which is probably closer to the result you wanted?

Still, I feel like ObiRope is a much better tool for this task. Specifically, its ObiRod component. It is explicitly designed to deal with tubes, rods, cables, and generally long and thin objects.

Let me know if you wish to refund your ObiSoftbody purchase for this reason.

kind regards