I need to simulate a working roller chain. The chain is over 500 links long and it needs to run in real time. I’m using Blender for modelling and animation. What’s the best approach on this?
I saw the rope thing earlier. I have not tried it but I have done a roller chain in Blender by using an array and a curve modifier. In this situation the mesh will deform and that’s not the best result for a simulation. Is it possible to do this with bones or a spline with instances or something else that does not deform the link mesh?
Here’s what I have now. Looks ok but links overlap a bit. There’s just too many links on the system (over 500) so the performance hit is too much. I need to calculate the player distance from the instance index location and decide if it needs to be updated. I just can’t figure out how I can start and stop the animation based on the player location.
Actually, the car in the content examples uses bones for it’s antenna. but that’s probably not a good solution with your >500 elements…
Solved this by adding an actor for each link that updates the instance. This way there is no lag from a long loop and the update frequency can be slowed down by distance of the player.