Procedural Rope System

Community Showcases
1

Hi All
First test of a rope/wire/hose system I’ve been working on this week. Uses our own soft body physics system to model the rope behaviour. The mesh produced can either be a fully procedural rope mesh with twists, strands end caps etc or a custom cross section or a mesh can be provided to be used to build the end mesh. The uv mapping can be altered as well. Various constraints can be added ie to attach the rope to an object. Also the rope can be made to collide with the environment. A webplayer can be found at Here Esc key for options. The rope is to the left in the scene.
Chris


2

looks pretty cool, how’s the performance?

3

Best looking rope yet. Very realistic!

4

Nice start. I’ve created a number of different variations of rope scripts (as well as used the one created by Jake) so this is always a topic that interests me. Although yours is pretty, I don’t understand why some objects seem to effect collisions while others don’t. How does yours handle very long lengths, going around pulleys, and being under tension (pulling)? Those have been issues I’ve run into with every rope script I’ve tried so far.

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Looks really good… One of the best ropes Ive seen so far.

Question though… does the rope take into account physical objects and collision boxes?

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Thanks All :slight_smile:
The objects the rope collide with is defined by a layer. The rock trees etc are part of the scatter system and in the demo dont produce colliders, so its just colliding with the ground and the bumps. Iam working on self collision and improving the collision system generally, the rope can get snagged very easily which I guess could be desired behaviour but also nice to have the option. The system has no problem at all with very long ropes, the physics system we use has a constraint method built in to keep the system stable and be able to handle big loads. One of the constraints that can be added is a pulley constraint, hope to have that working very soon.

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Looks nice

9

wow

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Will you consider custom mesh for it, to allow the building of metalchains in example?

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Uses our own soft body physics system to model the rope behaviour.
Do you mean that you use your own physics system not use the unity’s physics?

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Chains added. And yes I used my own physics system for the rope.


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Added a webplayer to show the chain working, press O to get options and slide down the dialog to change the link size. Still got self collision and a bit of tweaking to do. Not enough hours in the day :slight_smile:
Chris

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Nice looking scene, but all the image effects cause serious graphics errors on my machine (MacBook Pro, x1600 graphics, 10.6.7).

537586--18958--$DOF error.jpg
537586--18958--$DOF error.jpg1440×900 491 KB

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That’s an odd looking result you are getting there, does that happen only with the DOF effect or does each effect on its own cause problems?

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Each effect causes a different problem, but all of them occur in the top 1/3rd of the screen.

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Anyone else seeing the issue bigkahuna is having, want to try and track down if its computer type, card type or maybe driver issue to try and help me fix the issue. How much video memory do you have on that system by the way, almost looks like a VRAM memory issue, perhaps Iam not checking I get a valid handle.

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My MacBook Pro has a Core Duo 2 cpu and 256 MB of video RAM. Seems to work fine on my Windows 7 machine (i5, Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit, nVidia GeForce GTS360M with 1 GB graphics RAM built in, 1 GB of system RAM used by graphics).

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Thanks BigK. Going to have to dig up a Mac Book from somewhere now :slight_smile:

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@Spooky - If you need a beta tester, let me know. I’m between projects and am helping a couple other folks out with their testing.