How to simulate a soft drive belt between motor and pulley

I am going to simulate a motor to drive a mechanism by using drive belt and pulley, is there anyway to simulate the soft belt connection in MSphysices?

I would think you could apply the same principals shown in this video by Anton S.

Tank Tread

A couple of years ago, I was able to simulate the bending of a thin but wide flat flexible cable (FFC) using MS-Physics by decomposing the cable into a couple of hundred short segments, linked by joints. The tank-tread example posted by @c_j_ryan probably uses the same principle.

I must say, my experience was very painful. Firstly, constructing the model with about 250 joints with connections in the proper hierarchy was very tedious (MS-Physics would occasionally somehow re-link most of the joints to unintended objects, requiring me to re-connect them one-by-one-by-one). That happened a lot! Also, the physics engine would go unstable most of the time when running the simulation, causing a comical (and extremely frustrating) explosion of all the objects after a few seconds when segments of the flat cable got caught on each other as two or three loops of the concentrically-wrapped cable overlapped. It required a huge amount of trial-and-error to tinker with object properties, frame rate, etc. to get a usable run (without explosion).

Finally, I was never able to have MS-Physics actually save the animation - it would crash. Therefore, I used screen-capture techniques to grab the live action and then I used a video editor to approximately smooth out the rate of simulation (because the live physics engine didn’t run at a constant real-time speed). I don’t think I will ever attempt such a project with MS-Physics again, through I realize I was attempting an extreme simulation. With all that said, it is an amazing extension.

4 Likes