Making a tightrope

[LissomePrey]

I would like to make a tightrope stretched between two points for photography purposes.

I'm putting learning particle streams to one side for the moment (can you force a stream into a catenary curve out of interest?)

I thought a long cylinder would work and it seems to if I'm happy with a perfectly straight rope, i.e. no gravity sag. As soon as I make it a flexible prim though, gravity works from one end rather than both.

As a building newbie am I overlooking any obvious solutions?

[Rolig Loon]

Unless you can make a mesh rope -- not terribly difficult if you have some Blender experience and can follow directions in any of the loads of tutorials on YouTube --- you're probably stuck with the straight cylinder.  You could of course look around in MP to find if there's a commercial product out there. In the old days, people used to try all sorts of tricks with stretched and tweaked prims.  IMO, none of them was very satisfactory.  The rope always turned out to be odd-shaped, very un-ropelike.

Edited August 6, 2021 by Rolig Loon
typos. as always.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

There is a way to do it using the in-world sculpt or mesh creation tools. (you could actually do it with prims but you would have a 64 - prim rope)

Create a short cylinder, say 0.2 m long and 0.02x0.02 for the diameter. (If using the Mesh Generator tool, set the top and bottom faces to be transparent)

Copy this as many times as you want, changing the position and angle so it follows the required catenary curve.

Link and create the sculpt or mesh.

I've used this method to make railway lines and paper chains. The short straight lengths don't show up as much as you might expect, the eye and the brain seem to have an agreement to stop quibbling and just go with what one desires.

 

[Fenix Eldritch]

On 8/6/2021 at 8:59 AM, LissomePrey said:

can you force a stream into a catenary curve out of interest?

Just to answer this particular part: yes this is possible with a particle stream. To summarize, configure the particle emitter parameters such that it is targeting another prim (PSYS_PART_TARGET_POS_MASK and PSYS_SRC_TARGET_KEY). Then apply a negative acceleration along the z axis (PSYS_SRC_ACCEL, <0.0,0.0,-5.0>). This will cause the stream to move from the emitter to the target and also dip downward globally at the middle of the stream before arcing back up to the target.

I would also recommend using PSYS_PART_RIBBON_MASK which would turn the particle stream into a continuous and uninterrupted "ribbon" as opposed to a collection of separate particles.

Edit: be aware that the orientation of the emitter will affect how the ribbon is shown as well. Each segment in the ribbon has length and width, but no depth.

See the wiki page for info an the particle parameters.

Edited August 8, 2021 by Fenix Eldritch