I need to animate a line that is hanging loosely between two poles. It starts out hanging loosely and then slowly gets tightened so that it ends up pulled straight between the poles.
Can anyone suggest how I can pull that off.? I am an intermediate Blender person. Thanks.
I just tried something quickly and it may be a start.
Make your cable/tube however you wish just make sure you have enough edge loops to deform properly. Go into edit mode and select only the vertices at each end and add to a vertex group, name something like “pinning”.
Now add a “cloth” modifier and enable pinning and use the vertex group you’ve just created. Run the simulation and it will behave like cloth but be held up by the “pinning”. It may take some time to get the cloth settings right to make it look semi rigid.
Lastly you could go back to edit mode and select the vertices at one end and add a hook using Ctrl+h, set to new object and it will create an empty. Do the same for the opposite side… now you’ll be able to animate the locations of these empties to tighten the cable.
hope this gets you thinking anyway…
ha ha! I just finished posting this and realized there is a waaaay easier way to do this. It doesn’t need to use simulation at all.
All you need to do is create a bezier curve and arrange it so it resembles a sagging cable with only 3 points (each end and a middle point… you can do this by just subdividing once). Next create a CurveCircle to be used as the bevel object of the curve.
Now go back to the original curve and select one point at a time and Ctrl+h to create a hook for each point. Just animate each of the hooks over time to get the desired result.
should work perfect, and the bonus is that it will keep it’s volume, unlike the cloth sim.
Here’s a link to the blend file: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/4161
hope this helps!
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I think you may have solved what I was assuming was going to be a major problem for me. This was one that I just could not get my head around.
I’m going to try your suggestions today and will post back.
great I’m glad it helped… sometimes it’s good to have a fresh pair of eyes to solve a problem.
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