Using an object to move spirally to create a surface dip in Kangaroo

Hello!

I wanted to use the collision in Kangaroo to do a surface similar to the one I posted.

The idea was to let a object(here is a sphere, can be a oval shape as well) to move spirally and hit and push the circular mesh to create a circular surface dip.

The method I used was to use the Collider cell and then connect the vertices of the sphere mesh and circular mesh. But it was difficult to find a nice radii as input since the density of vertices of the sphere and circular mesh were very different.

Moreover, I didn’t find an efficient way to apply a force to let the sphere move spirally. Even if I found out the vector force that was tangent to the circular mesh at the starting point, after the solver ran, the force didn’t actully update according to the new position of the sphere.

At last, the surface dip was not obvious after the sphere moved to new position. I was hoping the mesh was elastic and flexible when it was pushed by the sphere and less elastic to hold the shape after the sphere ran away.

I am wondering whether there is a more efficient and correct method to achieve what I wanted.

Thank you!

Hi @Ken_H

If we simulate a sphere rolling on a flexible fabric mesh, it will end up in the centre, with the fabric in a rotationally symmetric shape around it.
Can you explain the overall aim here?

The overall aim was to create that surface for the top surface of a cylindrical shape. Similar to the surface in image posted below.
download (2)
But I wanted to create one that can be manipulated according to our design intent.

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I don’t think simulation with Kangaroo is the easiest tool to use for this.
Instead I think it would probably be easier to approach this using deformation tools, such as Maelstrom or Spatial Deform, or directly move the vertices or control points with vectors, varying their magnitude based on distance to some curves.

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whirl V0.gh (15.5 KB)

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I went through exactly this train of thought a while back… I ended up with the whirlpool3.gh file in the topic linked below that I really liked.
image

WHIRLPOOL

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Thanks for the example! This is really close to what I wanted with some small tweaks.

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