Coz wrote:
On the other hand, I have seen no discussion or and no demos of soft body tires
In the softbody demo there's a full "bunny" soft body vehicle, with soft tyres, and another weird kind of vehicle with three "ellipsoidal" soft tyres.
linksan wrote:
I played around with the softbody demos but couldn't figure out how to make an object stiffer.What parameter controls the stiffness of the spring?
softbody->m_materials[0]->m_kLST=kLST; // This seems to change the Link(s) elastic constant (AFAIK) Greater=Harder Smaller=Softer (in [0,1] range)
Other related useful things I've discovered/experimented (but I'm not completely sure about them):
Of course I think you should use pose matching as well:
softbody->setPose(useVolumeConservation,usePoseMatching);
softbody->m_cfg.kMT = kMT; // This must be something related to the volumetric elasticity (in the [0,1] range) but maybe it works only if useVolumeConservation is true.
To summarize my thoughts: I never tried something similiar because I think soft bodies are not flexible/stable enough to be used as wheels but if I should I would try with usePoseMatching=true,kLST=0.8 and (at first) useVolumeConservation=false (I think it might be more stable this way).
I say I don't think soft bodies are good enough for this, because in the past I've tried to simulate a soft soccer (icospherical) ball without being able to get any satisfactory results in stability/bouncing. IMH soft bodies on the other hand can be good to simulate other kind of objects, like cloths or fixed soft objects, without messing up too much with the parameters, that can lead to weird behaviors.
Anyway if you'll manage to do it, please let us know.
P.S. I still recommend to learn the use of the Blender Game Engine: it uses Bullet and you can play around with pose matching and the kLST constant easily without wasting time. That knowledge can be reused when programming your own soft bodies.
Hope it helps.