Ropes galore

[Pitcher]

I'm making a masted ship. Masted ships usually have guy ropes going all over the place to hold up the masts and yards. I can model ropes and tie the knots, but that runs up the patch count quite a bit. Is there a better way to run the ropes?

[Rodney]

As per usual there are several approaches.

Here would be an approach to get very minimal patches in bending rope:

 

 

To keep the patch count low I might model a master rope and then use that model as a decal for a lower patch density rope.

Use the modeled rope for hero shots where the rope is seen close up to further suggest the detail of the rope when it is seen farther in the distance.

 

In the attached the top two ropes only have four patches each.

They were decaled using the modeled rope on the bottom.

 

As for the knots... I'd be tempted to use a single patch set to one of several knot images and then place those closer to camera.

 

The important thing being.. what is the camera/audience seeing in the shot.

[Rodney]

Two other approaches that immediately come to mind:

 

Patch images

This would work great if you have a tiled rope image.

The benefit here being that you could draw all of your ropes in place with single splines... then use sweeper to sweep a cylinder over those splines.

Right clicking on the resulting SweptObject group and selecting Add Image would then allow you to apply the rope image to each patch.

And all of this without resorting to any twisting or revolving of the patches (the images themselves accomplish that).

For far shots you could then use the single splines colored black and of the desired thickness and turn the color setting of the patch image to 0% (fully transparent).

The downside of this is that each patch might require tweaking if the rope image needed rotating or the patches normals flipped.

An added benefit to this method would be that you might not need to apply this to any shape in 3D.

Just extrude a series of patches and apply the patch image of the rope... then modify to taste with respect to the camera.

 

Materials

This is one I haven't attempted with ropes but I would think it very straightforward.

The trick would be to apply it to an unshaped rope and then shape the rope in an action.

In this way all of the rope would always twist in the correct direction.

(I'll have to test this one out).

Bitmap Plus materials might work well with this approach.

[Pitcher]

Thanks, Rodney, for all the great ideas. I knew if you saw this that you would know how to keep my patch count out of the millions. I really appreciate your expertise and generosity in providing the solutions!

[robcat2075]

For Shaggy's "Bus Stop" Rope Trick I used a displacement map on a long cylinder.

 

 

 

Because Shaggy's rope had to start out as a coil of simulated cloth that would fall on his shoulders, and because that was a difficult shape to decal i tried using the image as a "Patch Image" first. However I found that many patches would have to be individually selected to "Rotate" the patch image into the intended alignment.

 

That was not undoable but I also found that when I set the image to Bump or Displacement the shading on many of the patches would appear inverted and I didn't have a solution for that.

 

What i ultimately did was to simulate with the original coil and then constrain a long,straight cylinder version of the rope, with the image applied as a regular cylinder decal, to the coil which was then hidden for render. There were about 100 spline rings that were individually constrained across the two versions.

 

(You can see several patches on the coil that did not orient right by default)

 

 

Since you do not need to simulate flexible rope with Simcloth, my first idea is that you could model your ropes as straight cylinders, decal them, then use a pose to bend them into the shape you need them to be on the ship.

[Rodney]

I think that is the same or at least a similar image map as the one shared (by Robert) in this topic:

 

https://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=47505

 

If you want to work through some of the various approaches or just troubleshoot the approach you are already taking chat, voice chat and video chat can all be used via the Animation:Master Discord channel. I tend to have that on whenever I'm online and folks can join in and assist as they have the opportunity.

 

 

The A:M Discord link: https://discord.gg/7G9MBc

 

 

Here's an example of Robert's displacement added to a cylinder with the cylinder models then duplicated in the Chor.

By only changing a Group's surface properties a wide variety of colors and styles can be created.