making sure cables wont cross each other
 

say i have lots of cablesgoing from one place to another and the bodys they are attached to wont always have the same rotation.
how would i go about having the cables adjust without passing through each other?

Could turn them into nCloth or soft bodies, put constraints on the ends, and make them collide with each other.

I read a little article on UP, and they had the problem with the thousands of balloon strings crossing over. So what they did, and maybe this is similar to NextDesign's suggestion, is for every control vertex on the strings, they made a small sphere and turned it into a rigid body!!! Talk about brute force. Haha.

nextdesign, nCloth... hmm, i heard that your models have to be extremely big for that to work (not a big problem really though)
i thought soft bodies still cross over each other (or maybe it was just my imagination last time?), or taht soft bodies only collide with rigid bodies

stwert, where did you read that? sounds like and interesting solution.
wonder how cheap that is

http://www.3dworldmag.com/page/3dwor...nd_the_scenes5

cheap in terms of computing power? Probably really really expensive.

i'm thinking i probably won't have that many cables!

sounds like an interesting solution though :D

It's not only that, but you would need a lot of vertices for that to work. High resolution, and lots of dynamics, are really slow!