Now that I had what I thought was a good piece of strong cord, I decided to incorporate it into a simple pulley system. The cord would be looped around two pulleys, and then, by pulling on one end of the cord, a weight would be hauled upward.
Alas, the softbody rope was unable to grip the pulleys and it was also extremely difficult and complicated to mouse-pick a point on the rope so as to manipulate the rope. So I abandoned the softbody rope for my old faithful rigidbody rope (as described in my previous post).Surprisingly, the BulletSharp version of this rope performed far better than any of my previous versions from other physics engine libraries. I was able to get a good length of rope/cord to wind around the pulleys without ugly instabilities raising their face, when applying load. There is, however, a limit to what can be accomplished.
Here is a short video showing mouse picking of the cord…as can be seen it can be a little tricky judging the placement the cord in the groove of the pulley.
This is a video of the pulley system in action…to save time, I had previously setup the cord around the pulleys.
Imagine trying to carry out all these tasks without the help of a physics engine!
This is why I get such pleasure working in my SciTech Playroom…no complicated software algorithms/calculations to fry your brain…the physics engine takes care of all the nitty-gritty stuff for you!