Hello Brian,

I imagine that key to modeling a rope is in creating an accurate single twist at the correct angle. I just created this 'quick and dirty' test in few seconds using a single squashed sphere arrayed along a curve using the latest features in Beta 2 (4 Aug).
To get something more accurate I should need to study an actual rope. I suppose the real question is do you want a model to resemble a rope or actually create a rope? The latter will be difficult and resource heavy. And if the model you want has multiple strands then it really will require some planning!
There is some really sound advice already on this thread.

Ray

Hi jonah,

> If you make an all quad tube in your subd modeler of
> choice, I am sure it will displace a bit better than an
> exported tube from MoI. Also it will be much easier
> to create texture maps...

Actually, part of MoI's advanced meshing technology also tends to make for all quad results from tubes just with the default meshing settings.

Here's a quick example - a basic tube:



Saved as an OBJ file from MoI:



Zooming in a bit you can see the all quad structure:



An all quad structure just gets naturally created there, so you should not really have to worry so much about going out of your way to do something special to get it.

In this example, there were actually 2 n-gons instead of quads created right in the seam area, so it was actually more like 99.99% quads and not quite 100% quads, but I should be able to fix that up.

The only exception is if you turn the angle slider way up to near the maximum value - once you get up to about less than 5 degrees in the angle parameter, the mesher will stop trying to get a totally uniform all quad mesh and will start using adaptive subdivision instead which will create a non-quad structure.

But if you stay below about 5 degrees on that slider you should get what you want there without any other messing around.

- Michael

Wow Ray, Nice results.

I think Brian is exercising his modeling skills. A great way to become even MORE skilled.

Imagine modeling the rope down to the braid, then adding "Hemp fibers" all along the rope with the same array settings enduced by the rope creation. That would be an awsome feat! (however, one to many late at night and you end up with "floating hairs" :) )

Burr

Hi Michael. Here is a quick test in Modo based on what you described...

jonah

Hi jonah, looks like a pretty good result!

- Michael

Yeah, not too bad! The only thing is you can see some problem areas where modo has a hard time dicing up the faces. I tried reducing the max disp edge length and the disp ratio to a minimum, but my 4Gb system ran out of memory. So this is about the best i could do!

jonah

Thanks all--keep up the info!

Looks like I will keep myself busy today.

Brian

Jonah .... you are great-
tanks
al

Thanks Al. But i know some people would strongly disagree :)

jonah