Anybody know how to twine?

#1

I was wondering if anybody knew how or knew a tutorial that showed how to twine a couple of cylinders (or whatever else might work better) together in the way that vines would grow or how rope is made.
I’ve done it in the past by just manually manipulating nurbs but for what i want to do now that would take a ridiculous amount of effort.
If anyone knows anything, it’d help me out tremendousely.
Thanks!

#2

Something like this?

Take a cylinder, move it’s pivot point to the center of the rope
Use the array tool (Tools > Array), set Total rotation to 360 degrees along the length-axis of the cylinder, and set the number of strings the rope will contain.
Apply the Twist modifier to all the cylinders.

There is possibly a more effective way to do this, since I had to use a cylinder with 50 length segments to make it look a bit smooth, so there will be lots of faces.

#3

the way i used to do is using particle system, then add a vertex through a script, see growing branches thread… of course it is not complete in this thread.

#4

You can also do this with a Loft compound object.

Use a line spline object to draw the rope “path”.

http://joshyy.webhop.org/wip/rope/01.gif

For the loft’s shape, use a spline circle and divide each of the four segments once.

http://joshyy.webhop.org/wip/rope/02.gif

http://joshyy.webhop.org/wip/rope/03.gif

You now have a spline circle with 8 vertexes, select half of them (let’s say the four originals) and scale them toward the circle’s center.
You’ll end with a shape looking like a clover. (hope this is the right word, I’m french speaking :wink: )

http://joshyy.webhop.org/wip/rope/04.gif

Use that as shape for the loft.

http://joshyy.webhop.org/wip/rope/05.gif

Now in the loft deformations, there are a scale and a twist graph, use both the tweak the loft.

http://joshyy.webhop.org/wip/rope/06.gif

set both point of the graph to the right scale (here 10%)

http://joshyy.webhop.org/wip/rope/07.gif

set the end point to a high twist value (3600, 10 turns)

So, we now see that the loft has not enough segments to display the twist. Raise path segments in the loft skin parameters. You may also want to have the vertexes evenly spaced on your rope, else you’ll need insane amounts of path segments.

http://joshyy.webhop.org/wip/rope/08.gif

Here you can see I used a normalize spline modifier on the path. Looks a lot better now.

Render without any texture:

http://joshyy.webhop.org/wip/rope/rope.jpg

Now for vines, experiment with multiple spline circles attached together in a single spline object and use that as your loft shape. (shape example:)

http://joshyy.webhop.org/wip/rope/09.gif

Render of that:

http://joshyy.webhop.org/wip/rope/vine.jpg

Hope it helped and was clear enough.

#5

thanks for all the help! it’s been helping out a lot!

#6

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