Rope lashing
polycounter lvl 9
Hey I was wondering if anyone had an idea for the best approach to moedeling rope lashings tieing two wooden poles together say for like a bridge? I am using Max 2009 and plan on taking it into Zbrush. I am trying to use splines but they ar ehard to get the shape to adhere to the pole areas I am trying to get to wrap them around. Any other suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks..
Replies
But i guess you could just draw a spline around the poles and give it thickness
- Model out a flat piece of rope.
- Probably just take 1 long cylinder instanced 3 times and use a twist modifier. Don't collapse it you might want to adjust it later, but keep it straight.
- Create your non-rendering path spline, probably set the verts to smooth instead of corner (select verts, right click, smooth)
- Take your instance of the rope, apply PathDeform(WSM) its at the top of the list don't use the regular PathDeform modifier it lacks a few options you'll need.
- Pick the path spline and then click move to path, you might need to change the orientation too so the right axis looks down the path.
- Adjust your path as you need and go back to the original flat rope to play with your rope, add segments play with the twist ect.
- If for some reason you scaled the rope object using non-uniform scale you need to reset the scale and transform by going to the hierarchy tab, reset scale & transform (you could do xform but its a modifier and kind of destructive and in this case overkill).
All the best,
Sweep is great for somethings like drain pipes, trim boarders, I-Beams, but sweep will only push a shape over the whole spline so at best you can use a circle and get a tube.
With PathDeform(WSM) and a solid chunk of modeled geo you can create twisting rope and even create specific details along the rope, something sweep won't get you.
qghostscape: there are two path deforms, one world space and one object space i think
LIke Neox said, make sure to use PathDeform(WSM) (top of the list) not PathDeform. It has options to move the geo to the path, and lets you pick the axis it aligns to. Vanilla pathdeform is pretty much a recipe for distaster.
I'll probably write something up next week, it came up at work too when we where talking about vines.
Yeah after I posted that I read about the the WSM version and the buttons to align it on different axes and move it to the path.
so basically I'm an idiot. That makes some things a lot easier, I've used the regular one and then had to slide the geo around and stuff and its a pain in the ass.
If you have some more advanced techniques and want to write them up that would be dope.
The spline in the front viewport (top of image) is the cross section spline that's lofted along the spline visible on the left. It's then got a twist value of about 35000 to make it twist around the spline.
A true 3D rope like that would require way too many polygons, and you would waste too much performance on a minor element of the scene. Unless the rope is 80% of the image.
I would just make a good tiling normal map and occlusion map, and then apply that to a plain thickened spline. Since max 2008 splines UV perfectly so it should work easily and quickly and efficiently. If you want to go a step further you could use a displacement map, and have that calculate during render time only, but that's also an unnecessary resource hog.
The ladies know what I'm talking about.
Baking it twice could have some undesired results also?
If you're concerned about performance you can:
-Set the object to display as a bounding box when you're not working on it (right click, object properties). While you're in there make sure to turn off backface culling.
- Or keep the rope on a hidden layer. Freezing it will sometimes help performance also.
- You can also use a Optimize/proOptimize modifier on it with a really insane level of compression then toggle it off when baking (click the light bulb in the modifier list).
- You can also use Xrefs with a low poly proxy mesh (probably more stable in 2010 but haven't tried it out).
Also you could get good UV's on splines previously to 2008. Just need to check Generate Mapping Coords in the rendering rollout for the spline. Maybe you're talking about mapping a non spline object with the new spline unwarp feature?
If you're wraping the rope around and object, and that will be baked into the object, you would want to go the highpoly route.
Someone else wanting to do the same thing, but in a different manner may end up reading this thread, so its good to cover multiple ways to do things.