Made some rope, adapted from a solidworks tutorial, which used sweep with a twist command.
In MoI, used sweep, then followed with twist command for 3 turns = 1080 degrees.
The outer cable of 6 ropes used the twist command again, with 1.5 turns = 540 degrees.
The second picture shows the result using the "surface" of the rope, without using all of the individual strands, which yielsd a smaller file size.
The two "starter" 3dm files just have two versions of the 2d profile, and path line.

RIGHT ON Bemfarmer! I see you have mastered the "Twist-Flow-Twist" technique... ;-)

Very nice rope simulation.

pretty cool indeed.

Many polys on export! :( probably i would make a texture for the small details

Hi Max,

> Many polys on export! :( probably i would make a texture for the small details

A texture is definitely going to be a lot more efficient. But it's often difficult for a texture to look 100% the same as real geometry especially if you are going to be zoomed in at all. If it's going to only be a tiny thing on the screen then a texture instead can work well though.

There are techniques you can use on the rendering side to start with high res geometry like this, then create a normal map from that which then is applied to a low res mesh. That usually does a good job but for that method you need to start with an initial detailed high res mesh.

If you're just doing a still rendering and not making game assets, it's not really so much of a concern to have a lot of polygons on export these days - renderers are much more able to handle high poly counts than say 20 years ago.

- Michael