I'm looking to animate a rope that is attached to a winch on one and and an object on the other end. I want to animate the winch winding the rope and pulling the object closer.

First Attempt: I started with my Physics Enabled cable which is basically a number of segments that are physics joined together with a non-physics shell to make the cable look solid. It is a cable that I am selling on my Marketplace and it has the advantage (over soft cloth) that it can be attached to multiple objects. However this idea failed because the spaces between the physics joints (which are normally not visible due to the mesh cover) allow the cable to pass through the winch axle as the cable is wound-up when I animated the winch.

Second Attempt: Create the winch and rope as soft cloth and make the winch hard cloth and the rope soft cloth. I could not get that working either. Either the winch would fall or the rope was stiff.

Obviously a solution would be to forget about physics and make a long segmented cylinder with bones for each segment so that I could pains-takingly animate the rope manually...but that seems like an incredible about of work.

Any solution that I might have missed or is  the slow and steady manual animation of rope segments the way to go?

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