How hard can it be to make rope?!
 

Im not sure where to post this so I hope this is right. I am having toruble making some rope. I know it sounds silly.

I started with simple Polygon tubes and thought I could get away with just putting a nice texture on them but that's not really going so well so I have residned my self to making all the rope on my HMS Victory WIP again :(

So with that I did a little search on the both the internet and on this site and the best I came up with was mhcannon's Make a Quick Rope (Part 1) thread but I am having poblems with it. For a start my rope is looking more like an umbilical cord than anything else. I like the twist but it's way too slack.

Please help if you can.

lol umbilical cord, i dunno what you could do but wouldnt it be easier just to make a texture and apply it to a cyclinder, i dunno good luck the ship looks sweet btw.

That's what I thought but all the textures I hvae don't look that good. The camera might go fairly close to them so I want them to have a bit of texture. Foiled at the last hurdle

:headbang:

If you're interested, I could do them for you in Lightwave. There's a cool plugin called Rope Editor which allows you to do just this. If you are interested, send me the specs of the ropes you want and I'll take a look at doing them for you.

I would try to instead make it straight and then use the Twist deformer.

http://www.mtmckinley.net/SimplyMaya/rope.jpg

You get some flares at the end, but you can cut those off.

Thanks for the offer kennez, but im not sure how easy it is to get models from lightwave into Maya and if the model will actually be altered in the transition.

I have tried Mike's method and liked it. The only problem is that it needs to be twisted way more to have it looking like the same sort of rope on the Victory.

I am now experimenting with this method of using the new Maya 7 primitive of the Helix. Basicaly it makes a spring so all you need to do is duplicate it 4 times each rotating 90 degrees to get to the picture below.

The only problem is that is adds loads more polys to an already big file and may make rendering a bit of a problem, but if that's the only problem then I guess I will have to suffer that.

It's actually quite easy to transfer models between the two, and nothing is lost in the process. There are a number of different ways (OBJ, FBX, 3DS).

Mike's method looks like it might be extremely useful.

Well kennez, if you could just do us a wee bit of rope in lightwave and up laod it then I could have a looka dnsee how good it is.

If it too big to fit here you can upload it on www.yousendit.com

I have found another method which I think might be the one for me. Slightly different to Mikes but along the same lines. I thought I would post it here just incase there is some poor guy searching the forums.

You basicaly make a four leaf clover shape, use curve snap and put it on the start of the curve and then rotate it so it is looking down the curve ready to extrude.

Goto Surfaces -> extrude optionbox and click the circle buttons for the first 4 lines all on the right side then extrude.

Click the geomerty you have created and open the channel box, click on extrude1 then type 600 and you get the picture below.

It's light on the geo and should be that hard to move around and make the shape you want.