Create a shower hose with correct physics

Question

I'm making a shower hose that follows the handle when it moves.

I've created it successfully following THIS tutorial, but the hose is too "elasticy". I'm wondering which settings I should change (from the tutorial) to make it more rigid.

I also want it to have less "bending points" when it's moved, it should really only have one major curve like shower hoses do when you move them around.

Cheers.

Answer 1

I believe the Softbody Simulation won't give you enough control over the movement. Here is an alternate method using a rigid body simulation.

^{The flickering is caused by the gif compression and not by a simulation error artefact.}

It uses a chain of rigid bodies like in lemon's answer.

1. Enable the rigid body world.
   
2. Add a cylinder, make it a cylindrical rigid body. Then duplicate it. ⇧ ShiftD
   
3. Create an empty and place it inbetween the cylinder rigid bodies. Make it a rigid body constraint. Set the type to Point and select the two cylinders.
   
4. Create another rigid body constraint (on another empty): a generic spring. Enable the springs you need. I would use a very high rotation damping value, since a hose wouldn't wobble around. [0.9999]
   I parented the generic spring constraint to the first point constraint, and the point constraint to the first cylinder, but this is just for easier visualization. The point constraint acts like a spherical joint between the two cylinder and the spring pushes the cylinder back to their original positions, ensuring minimal bending.
   
5. Create more cylinders, constraint and chain them. They're now ready to be simulated.
   
   ^{Note, how the twisting of a single joint in the chain influences its surrounding joints.}
6. You can now transfer with movement to an armature with Copy Transforms constraints.
   
7. You can also connect it to a curve using many hook modifiers. The drawback of this method is, that the rotation of the rigid bodies is not used.