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?

"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

It might be possible with Super Bone Editor plugin (Python based) https://forum.reallusion.com/415100/Super-Bone-Editor-Plugin?PageIndex=1
Or flex tube https://forum.reallusion.com/424631/So-I-am-finally-getting-somewhere-with-a-flexible-tube-that-will-hold-its-shape-while-bending?PageIndex=1 (I'll try tomorrow to see if it's feasible)

4u2ges, that locking mechanism you came up with might work for one, or both, of the ends. But it can just be pinned with black at one end.

I also did something like that where I locked one end of the cable. The upper ends of the cable are enlarged to lock into a receiver. They do break away pretty easily though!

I was too intrigued to wait till tomorrow
This is possible, but the use is probably limited as it is hard to stabilize the rope.
(rope is invented by Rampa and I have added a special hook).



To spare explanation I have attached the project

Awesome!

I will obviously need to copy your locking mechanism. It works much better than mine did.

This looks very much like what I need. So the part of the cable at the head is just pinned with softcloth black and the other end is designed to go around (lock) around a separate object which can then be animated? 



"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

Thank you very much. While Rampa provided a solution a project example is worth a thousand words. Thank-you for your project example.



"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

This is a great solution but I have a few comments and/or questions...
1. I see that you added an object for the rope (tube) driver. I think this was my issue when I tried it myself. I was attaching the rope (tube) directly to the winch for animation and, now, I realize that can't work because it will trigger an immediate collision. Having the driver, as in your project, seems to resolve that issue.
2. I noticed that you have a Winch object and a Winch Rigid object. It appears that the first is used for the visualization mesh while the second is being used for the physics. What was the reason behind this? Why could you not just activate the physics on the Winch itself? Was this to reduce the complexity of the mesh for physics in case the winch mesh is complicated?
3. What was the reason for using multiple locking objects as opposed to one O-ring? Was this to avoid having to use the Self Mesh on the lock objects (because Self Mesh is computation expensive compared to spheres)?



"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

I'm trying to reproduce similar effects as those in Rampa\4u2ges solution.

Initially I made my own pipe and tries to make the lock using a single O-Ring. That did not seem to work so I tried using a number of spheres and that too did not work. However, when I put a simple box in the way (to prove that collision is being calculated) it did work. The enclosed project shows 4u2ges tube (I swapped his for mine to eliminate the possibility that mine was defective) with a oversize O-Ring. Initially I was trying this as an alternative to the lock that 4u2ges used (which used multiple objects) but when the tube seem to go right through it, I oversized it and had the tube fall on it to see if I am getting any collision what-so-ever. As can be seen, the oversized O-Ring seems to cause the tube some resistance but eventually the tube passes right through it. However, I also added a sphere inside the O-Ring that drops on to the bottom part of the O-Ring. That collision works fine - the O-Ring is solid for the sphere and does not let it through. I checked and the Collision setting between Soft and Rigid is set to 0.01 which should be a nice tight collision.

I have compared the working 4u2ges sample project and the settings in this project but I don't see any reason why the soft cloth is passing through the rigid object.

I can't seem to attach the project (I get an error saying I have exceeded some limit) so here is a link to the project from G Drive:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1QL5bMC5dPZFm-dJaSuHWUxOrC0em5xjd   



"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

The answer is actually simple. Rigid Self-mesh body and soft cloth do not interact well to say the least. Solving this problem by RL would greatly contribute to the Avatars collision shapes concept.
But I doubt it will ever happen as it seems to be an NVIDIA limitation. So we are limited to plain Box, Sphere and Capsule shaped to interact with cloth.

About the winch. I did initially rotate the rigid winch itself. But that ended up in addition rope instability. So I have added a fake rotating winch.