The rope tag can be used to simulate the physical behavior of ropes. To do that you just have to add the rope tag to an editable spline object and turn on Dynamics. For pinning spline control points to other rigid bodies please use the Anchor tag.

The rope simulation is performed in the global coordinate system. So the transformation properties of the spline object are not influenced by a simulation.

The rope simulation does only animate the control points of a spline but not its tangent vectors. It is therefore recommended to use spline of Type=Linear.
The rope simulation is limited to a max. of 10.000 control points!!!
Should ropes penetrate other objects increasing the Solver Iterations property of the rope tag or the Accuracy property of the Dynamics settings might help.

Attention: You can only add a rope tag to editable spline objects.

Properties

• Mass: Specifies the total mass of the rope.
• Stiffness: Specifies how stiff the rope is. Low values result in elastic ropes while higher values generate stiffer ropes.
• Damping: Specifies how strong the linear movement of the rope control points is damped. The higher the damping value the faster the rope movement slows down.
• Friction: Specifies how strong the rope is influenced by frictional forces between two objects.
• Recover shape: When using this property the spline remembers its original shape and tries to recover it.
• Margin: The margin adds some additional collision tolerance. In case of the rope the margin can be considered as the radius of the rope. The margin should never be zero.
• Bending constraints: The bending constraints specify the max. adjacent distance of control point influencing each other. Higher values generate stiffer ropes.
• Solver iterations: The higher this value is the more simulation steps the physics solver will calculate for each simulation frame. So higher values generate more accurate simulations results at the cost of longer calculation times. Especially when ropes penetrate into other objects higher solver iterations can solve that problem.