problem: object touching

[Otuama]

Hi Anaxarchos.

I'm working with ottix and have posted some videos on my vimeo channel with some descriptions for ottix of problems with the file she sent me.

A question for you though..... Ottix wants the the letters in the video to move over the wave and form a jumbled lettered circle (like the visually stunning image below).

She was using an attractor daemon which pulled the objects in the right direction but then of course the objects tried to surround the daemon.

I'm currently using a gravity daemon which seems to be doing the job in sending it in the correct direction but it's the forming a circle bit I'm trying to figure out.

Do you have any ideas how to achieve this?

I tried adding a cylinder and setting its collision side to 'Inside' in the hope that the letters would go in and become trapped but that didn't work. Obviously because the letter objects had their collision set to 'Outside'. Even if both are set to inside it doesn't word because the letters get stuck half way through the walls of the cylinder.

[Otuama]

Actually, maybe what I could do is load in a split cylinder.

When the letters are within the area of the cylinder and are colliding with one half, the other half is made active to close them in. Hmmmmm.

[Anaxarchos]

The attractor with attenuation could also work, but I haven't tested that.
The attraction force on the outside needs to be strong and on the inside there mustn't be any force at all to prevent the objects from stacking.

I am not sure if the standard attractor deamon is precise enough for this kind of work but it is not very difficult to create one via scripting.

[Otuama]

In the end I used a magic daemon. Actually, I ended up using 2 because a couple of letters were being pains. It seemed to work quite well.

Vimeo