Ribbon between 2 sticks?

[Adrian@Stufish]

Simple 'soft body' sim, but I can't find a way to make it work.
- probably because I don't have a week to spare to play with it.
Think a ribbon with a stick at each end, move the sicks around and let the ribon 'hang' between them in a 'natural' curve.
It looks easy enough to have a stick at one end and wave it about, with gravity, wind, and whatever (i.e. a flag). But a stick at each end ? - and I don't want the ribbon to be able to stretch.

[hunter]

something I learned at the LW free training here at siggraph. Open motion designer and pay attention to the surface settings especially the fixed 2 surface. It referecnes a null like "targeting."
Also look at the models in modeler to find out where the surfaces are.
Hope it helps. :)

[Adrian@Stufish]

Got it and looked at, and sort of understand it, but a few problems.
1) 5 out of 6 attempts to set up the 'targeting' fail to operate, and once it's failed nothing I do seems to make the Fixed2 surface head towards it's target. I'm just setting up the whole scene over and over and occasionally it works.
2) even when it works, and I'ved saved the .mdd file, the next time I open the scene I have to point to the file again, and with multiple instances and the dodgy file requester, and me wanting to do nework rendering - its a but iffy.
3) the project I'm rendering - which is a visualisation of a real event to-be, involves 100' lengths of 54" cloth waving through the air.
I'm having to set it up at 1/10 scale in MD and lie about gravity etc., and then scale the object with its .mdd file my 10, 'cause MDD goes ape with an object that big !

Any one got the beast tamed ?

[hunter]

maybe you could post a sketch of what you are trying to achieve because 100' lengths seems to me would be attached to something more substantial than sticks. You might be able to just model the banners sort of curved apply a weightmap and use a displacement texture to simulate the wind.

[Adrian@Stufish]

They're 100'+ lengths of 54" fabric hanging between 2 concentric circular truss structures - a 150' dia circle and a 100' dia circle.
the lines of 'ribbon' go back and forth in the 25' gap, but they run diagonaly rather than radially, and 2 colurs of ribbon alternate on opposite diagonals, but rather than 'basket weave' one colour will be slightly longer than the other to hang beneath.
The trusses start out at the same height, with the ribbon hanging in long loops, then the centre one is lowered about 75' over one minute so that the ribbons hang in gracefull curves.
(this is a design proposal for a one-off show in a very big stadium)
Its' very difficult to set up morphs realistically - though I may end up using MD to generate them !
I have managed to generate a couple of convincing ribbons with .mdd files, and after a lot of f...ing about with my directories LW can load the scene with 16 of each of them in, on any of my machines.
Unfortunately, although using the same .cfg files, lwsn won't load the scene on any machine ! - it just hangs.