13 Feb

Clavichord 2: simple 2d mass-spring system

Today, I had hoped to have a 2D mass-spring system worked out, but it turns out the tutorial I was working from was flawed and overly simplistic, so I had to work out some math from first principles.

A 1-dimensional spring is simple – there are 2 points, the distance is simple to figure out, and when you figure out the forces (spring force, damping, gravity), it’s very obvious how to apply them in the single dimension available to you.

So, a 1-D mass-spring system is easy. Example here.

In 2 dimensions, things get a lot more tricky. Firstly, the distance between two points is no longer a simple subtraction ( 1d: z2-z1, 2d: sqrt((x2-x1)^2+(z2-z1)^2) ), but even worse, the forces being applied are proportional to the angles between the points.

So, today, I spent the most of the last few hours just making yesterday’s work easier to manage, and creating some “helper functions” to apply forces on nodes.

The example: 2d mass spring.

Tomorrow I’ll try extend the system a bit more so you can have a few nodes all linked together – like a chain or net. At the moment, the “spring” physics in the system only applies the spring force to one side of the link, so I’ll need to adjust that so the spring is applied to both. It will be interesting to see how two nodes hanging side-by side on a line behave.

Leave a Reply