Is anyone aware of a way to keep Cloth from stretching to infinity when it is used with Rigid Body. I am trying to connect a small rigid body to a STRING (the cloth) with a hook and then let the rigid body fall and swing on the string. I am using cloth for the string and not another Rigid Body connected because I want the string to act like string. And I am not using Softbody because I need the pinning property of cloth.
Anyone aware of a property that sets a stretch limit on Cloth?
Can you make the cloth actually apply a counter-force on the rigid body? If you have a falling ball (rigid body) and have pinned a part of your cloth to it, I’m not sure there’s a direct way to cause the falling ball to “know” that it should be getting pulled back by the cloth. They’re operating under different simulations. Only the hook/pin is making the connection, which is indifferent to physics.
You could, for instance, rig up some sort of swinging, springy rigid-body thing for the ball that simulates the cloth, then use the hooks/pins to make it seem like the cloth is pulling back on the ball. But I’m not sure Blender’s simulations are sophisticated enough to directly interact a cloth sim with a rigid body sim. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong…
(I posted this on another cloth-sim thread yesterday, but I think I meant to post it here )
Just tried something out that worked surprisingly well:
After creating your “cloth string”, add a dense mass of faces at the end of it – basically a “weight” within the cloth simulation. Make sure these are a connected to the rest of the mesh somehow. The simulation does a nice job of showing that weight. In this example, I added stiffness to the “weights” on the string so they look kind of like bricks hanging on the end. In rendering, you could use shaders to make the weights invisible, along with some vertex parenting to attach the actual thing that’s dangling from the string. This could work really well, actually. This is a pretty promising approach, in fact…
Both of these have the same simulation settings; the only difference is the “weight” is added on the mesh on the left.
Interesting Blend file, I don’t use the Cloth Stiffness Scaling panel very often and have never used the Bending Stiffness. This seems to work as long as the weight is part of the Cloth Object, with or without the Cloth Stiffness Scale enabled. Unfortunately when I attach another object to the Cloth Object I get the infinite stretch. Your idea about the vertex parenting does work and with that I searched a little and found a couple of videos from EnigmaToots that describe some excellent approaches for what I am trying to accomplish.
I increased the “cloth weight” stiffness so it could be used more easily in vertex parenting for the fake weight (the one we actually see). It also causes the cloth weight to behave more like a rigid object.
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