Bending Beam (Physic Engine)

[udin]

Hello every body ...

We have a project to make visualization of bending beam (interactive). See picture (atatchment).
.
If the force (W) increase (value of W filled by user), the bending/hogging will increase.
Do you have any example for project like this ? We used VB6 and VB.net to develop this project.

Tanks

[Toaster]

Good luck this isn't something easily achieved.

-Toaster

[Mithrandir]

You can try breaking the body into several sub bodies connected by joints with significant stiffness.

[WEst]

I think this depends, on what you want to do.

If you are doing the calculations by yourself (which I assume you do) you can simply use a box with some tesselation in one direction and set the vertex positions using a function like SetGeometry. This should be easily fast enough.

[ZaPPZion]

Another solution would be to create the beam and some morph targets in a 3D package like 3ds max, and then morph between the different stages. It's not the easiest solution, but it might look good and it's something cool to learn.

[arnienet]

Or make a beam with about 20 vertices along its length for example.
Then put a bone at each end and weight the vertices towards the middle
with progressively less influence. You could then move the bones by -Y by force W
in code to achieve a realistic downward deflection relative to the force.

It's not a physics solution, but it would be relatively quick and easy to implement.
I might be able to help if required.

[jviper]

Sounds like what you really want is semi-rigid, or soft body physics support, which I do not believe the Newton Game Dynamics Physics Engine (which by the way is what the TVPhysics) does not support. I'd say the most convincing would be the beam as a TVActor with bones across it's length, physics bodies for each segment, and joints with stiffness between the physics bodies (joint collision disabled).