After our initial integration of rope physics and a VR player, we wanted experiment with cutting the rope.

We placed a curtain pulley prototype and an interactive sword into a scene to experiment with rope slicing. The initial cutting system we had detected the plane of where the slice needs to occur and the path of travel, using the tip of the sword. These tearing functionalities are built in our physics library package.

This package doesn’t support a true “slicing” feature for rope objects, only offering a “tear” function that rips the rope’s mesh into uneven, small triangles. Thus, we had to script the slicing functionality manually.

(↑) These prototypes demonstrate our first attempt at slicing rope. You can see the rope ends look awkward due to a lack of rope capping, and it also cuts off in multiple chunks, popping a section of the rope off with each slice.

(↑) A bit more work and our prototype looks closer to a realistic rope slice.

More soon!