I’ve been working on a rope actor, and have some doubts my googling hasn’t been able to solve. Essentially, I have a rope actor consisting of a series of child actors, which act as chain links of sorts. They’re held together by physics constraints, and I’ve gotten it looking quite realistic.
I’ve got a third person character who, when an input is pressed, checks for the closest of the chain link actors, and attaches it to his hand, disabling physics for that specific link. Afterwards, when the character moves, the rope drags along - so far so good. This is how grabbing the rest of the items in my game works.
However, I’d like to be able to let the rope slide through the hand as I move. So, if the character moves forward, he wouldn’t drag the rope, but slide his hand over it, letting it run over the fingers, until the end of the rope is reached (or the grip is tightened,) returning to the dragging behavior.
Imagining a rope consisting of 5 links, if I grab link 3, then that link pulls all others when the character moves. I’d like to be able to grab link 3, and then have it smoothly “slide” over links 2, and 1, and only then start dragging when the end of the first link is reached - I don’t really need the character holding the middle of the rope, but rather get to the end after a few steps.
I’ve attempted to dynamically affect the held link’s relative position by the inverse of the parent’s movement, and to toy around with attachment settings and physics constraints to no avail. I feel like this should be a relatively easy fix, but I haven’t been able to figure it out on my own after a couple weeks, and while there’s a lot of info in regards to how to make the rope, there’s none I can find on regards of the character’s interaction with it as a grabbable item.
I can provide my blueprints if needed, but I’m looking for more of a conceptual, high-level direction to explore rather than a specific set of nodes. Hope I’ve managed to be clear enough!
Thanks in advance!