Suggestion / Idea Ladder made by Ropes (Ratlines)

[josemendez]

Maybe an idea, if I make the full ladder as a single mesh instead of multiple single ropes?
Would this work with the other features like tearing and interaction?

Rendering and physics are completely orthogonal to each other: how you render the ladder has *zero* impact on physics simulation. All ropes managed by a solver are already automatically batched together (as long as they share the same material) and rendered as a single mesh for performance reasons.

If you had in mind a single flat mesh for the entire ladder with a texture on it (kinda like cloth, more than a net), that could work in case you want very low-quality approximation. But in this case, ObiCloth would be a better fit.

I'd prefer a more realistic solution with multiple ropes but if you think the workload would be exponentially higher, I'd rather skip that.
Or if you have any other rough ideas, please let me know

The number of ropes doesn't matter in terms of performance either. What matters is the number of particles used to represent the rope (or ropes), and how often the simulation is updated: spatial and temporal resolution, respectively.

So 1 rope made of 1000 particles and 10 ropes made of 100 particles each have the exact same cost. Depending on how you want the character to interact with the ladder, and how realistic you want rope-rope interactions to be, you'd need a finer or a coarser representation of the ladder.

At a minimum, you'll need one particle per rope intersection in the ladder. Then I'd add one extra particle at each "square edge" so that the ropes are at least able to droop a bit. Then depending on how fine/detailed you want the simulation to be, and how you want to handle character interaction with the ropes (each limb has IK towards the closest particle and hands/feet get constrained to the particles is the first thing than comes to mind) you may go for a more detailed representation.

kind regards,