The ol' rope question

[DrYo]

There's another method... soft bodies with springs

[toenexx]

Thanks for input. Any idea which one would be the best and/or easiest to do? Also, any dvd's or online tutorials that show how to set stuff up like that?

[Neill]

If U need polys collisions, I provide nCloth, cause IMHO It has better collision math that all others in Maya. If collisions are not to extreme, I advise U to use Maya hair... It's easy and powerfull tool too

[thematt]

I would definetly keyframe such an animation..trying to do that with dynamic will make your head hurts.

cheers

[toenexx]

Yea, I had some discussions with some of my peers. Most agreed that keyframing manually will probably be better. I also find that if I did it that way, I can get it exactly right. Thanks for suggestions.

P.S. Also if anyone has any ideas of tutorials or training vids that teach this teachnique using dynamics or w/e, I would appreciaite it alot! Learning = ownage.

[Neill]

Yea, I had some discussions with some of my peers. Most agreed that keyframing manually will probably be better. I also find that if I did it that way, I can get it exactly right. Thanks for suggestions.

P.S. Also if anyone has any ideas of tutorials or training vids that teach this teachnique using dynamics or w/e, I would appreciaite it alot! Learning = ownage.

manual keyframing is too hard and will take a lot of time. For ropes I always use hair system and manualy manipulate it with transform and collision hair constraints. When I see that the common motion is ready, I bake curve to bones and then I just clean a little keyframes for make motion smooth and correct (I use MotionBuilder for cleaning, cause layers is the best way to correct motion)... IMHO, It's better pipeline then animating all manually from the very begining.

[toenexx]

Since I havent experimented yet with hair, I think I will just jump right in and see what I can cook up with it.

[toenexx]

Would there be a way to make the sphere a collision object so that the dynamic hair curve (the rope) doesn't go thru the sphere?

[toenexx]

it seems I am heading the right direction. I found this tutorial online:

http://www.mindspring.com/~jkemp/cord.html

I'm still in the process of getting the hang of this, but I'll keep ya guys posted.

[Als]

You can use different techniques on different shot, or part of shot.
I would go for hair because that's really very close without much effort, plus very nice is that you can drag/animate hair to tie it down.
Check the duncans blog with telephone:
http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/blogs_duncan/blog_detail/creating_a_dynamic_telephone_cord/

To tie something around sphere you can also use softbody particles on the nurbs sphere directed by UV's, or just use ncloth for that. ;)
Also if you can't get around the concept of all happening around the sphere,
you can animate it all on the flat plane 2x1, then densed lattice the whole thing, and bend lattice with two deformers, with curve 3.14 and that's it...

Cord is nice tutorial, check also cable tutorial is very good, and there is chain mel script too...

http://www.dezfx.com/HTML_pages/TutorialPages/dynamicRope.html

All could be used for this...
If you have realflow, it has rope too... worth checking out, me thinks...

You can use helix geometry as a "aim" geometry for ncloth, or use it around cylinder then bend deform it, as mentioned...

Also geometry constraint might be of use...

If you have maya 5 still, this might be of use:
http://highend3d.com/maya/downloads/plugins/animation/2790.html

If you have max, then this might be of interest:
http://www.3dluvr.com/content/article/87/4
http://www.the3dstudio.com/product_details.aspx?id_product=33133

This is the site of very nice tool for animating something like this:
http://www.renderwahnsinn.de/research.htm

Or just do it by hand animation:
http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/rope/rope.htm
You might think of rotoscoping it as well...



Als

[toenexx]

So I ended up just animating the rope manually, and it's turning out ok. Here's a playblast:

http://www.brianalvarez.tv/carbon/ropetwist.mov

The animation is, obivisouly not finished. However before proceeding in refining it more, I noticed I been getting a weird issue with the rope twisting, which is detected by the uv's in the playblast. I've tried a couple things: lattices, wire tool, twist, etc. to try and fix the issue but I still haven't found a solution. I even tried duplicating the skeleton on the rope, and binding a lattice (thats on the rope) so it follows the rope, however it justs makes the rope offset.

The only other solution I thought about was to redo the animation, but putting a lattice on the original tube before I binded a skeleton and animated it.

Any ideas?

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