Golaem – contraints a rope to entities

Hi there!

Developing a shot for my own personal sci-fi project I encounters some difficulties to figure out … how I can do that?

The shot mainly show some miners/slave that pulling a floating cargo, and at one point the character to the right must to falling down . The first thing I figure out is the setup of the ropes, in fact the ropes need to be constrained to the hands of the characters… and in this case the best Golaem’s node that can help me is the beConstraint node! That’s great…

Here the result of my first test / setup:

Now I briefly explain this simply setup.

1. Populate a scene with a few character (I used five), and add a Motion Behavior node and load a simple motion , in this example I used the slow walk that come from the Golaem’s locomotion character pack.
2. Create a locator for all entities you want to add the constraint behavior, in my case all of that, so create 5 locator with a good naming convention , something like ‘loc_contraint_00’, ‘loc_contraint_01′,’loc_contraint_02’ etc…
3. Now we need to setup the beConstraint node! mainly you need to specify which bone is used as constraint target, and then specify which object will be constrained. As you see in the Goalem’s documentation there are several tag to use as prefix or sufix of the objects to constraint, In my case I used the #pid# tag that return the Particle ID ; so in the object name set up something like bottom_#pid# in this way Golaem constraint the object based on Particle id . In the following image you can see my setup .

So now if you play the sim you should see the locator constrained to the hand of the character.

4. Last step is to setup the ropes and make them dynamic using Ncloth , in this sample I didn’t setup anything of special just added Ncloth .But we need to add some setup to make the rope anchored to certain point and make the end of the rope following our locator… So I used a simple setup using NConstraint > Component to Component … and if you are comfortable with a Ncloth in a couple of minutes you have a great setup ready to work!!

Hope you liked! If you have any specif question just write me a line!

Cheers!

N.B.: When you are happy with sim keep in mind that you need to cache the Ncloth before the crowds!