By using an Array modifier and a Curve modifier, this tutorial takes you through the process of modeling a rope in Blender. Due to the use of modifiers, the resulting rope is very easily modified, lengthened, etc to fit any purpose.
User Submitted Images
No images submitted yet
Discussion
28 Responses to “Modeling a Rope”Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I have the solutions to 2 problems that you had in the tutorial:
1. Strange artifacts caused by the array modifier: Just place the subsurf below the array in the modifiers’ stack.
2. Strange deformation at the ends of the curve: The path curve has the property: “speed”. This is why it deforms the mesh strangly. Go to IPO of the curve, Chose IPO type: “path” and change the interpolation of the curve to linear.
By the way: Great tutorial. Thank you
hey how exactly did u select ONLY one section when u began the twisting process? im haveig trouble, i keep getting single faces bundles or edge etc. but i cant just select or deselct just ONE section altogether, how exactly do u select an entire section automatically
@justin:
Hold down SHIFT+CTRL and right-click on one of the sides of the circle you want to select. Don’t click on a vertex, as Blender can’t tell which way to extend the selection.
@Jonathan:
Thanks for a great tutorial!
I think that is SHIFT+ALT+RightClick instead of shift+ctrl… at least in blender 2.49b.
Thanks for the tutorial Jonathan!!
Hello Jonathan,
I am Currently working on a project that involves a vine growing from a seed. I figured that I could use this rope tutorial for the base of the project. I was also trying to practice with your extendable Chain
http://www.blendercookie.com/2009/11/28/model-extendable-chain/
and get it to animate like a vine, But I cannot get the curve to animate in edit mode. Is there another way to do this?
The animation is supposed to be like a Jack and The Beanstalk thingy
Thanks
Hello Jonathan
Thanks for this great tutorial. Now I have a question: Suppose you have a really, really complex scene with not only ladders made of this rope hanging from trees, but also fully-rigged characters climbing on this rope. In order to reduce the vertex count and, thus, memory, wouldn’t it be good to create this rope first, in Blender, save the render as a Jpeg, and then use it as a NOR UV map on a cube that is stretched out to simulate a rope? Like, you could create a bunch of straight and narrow cubes, stretched out for background material, and use just one of these ropes for the close up on the character animation, like where the hand hangs on the rope, etc. Just my thoughts. I keep running up against the brick wall of memory whenever I try to get any more complex.
-Rick
@Rick: You’re right in principal, but I think your best bet will be to produce a length of rope and then bake a normal map rather than use a rendered image. In your complex scene, you can then use simple cylinders (or path extrusions for more complex shapes) and apply the saved normal map to them as textures.
(If you don’t know about baking normal maps, there’s plenty of tutorials out there.)
Steve.
Hi,
Trying to do this in Blender 2.53
When whatching video at time 04:38 is mentioned a knife tool (Shortcut K)
Is there something similar that you can use in Blender 2.5 Beta???
Did not quite get the Edge Loop tool to simulate the experience…
Hi Harald,
The Knife tool has been temporarily removed during development. To simulate this with the Edge loop cut tool you can hide the faces at each end of the cut you would like to make and then cut across the remaining faces.
-Jonathan
if any of you had the same problem i had when duplicating the hexagon with the “spin duplicate tool” make sure the spin is set at 360, im not sure if that’s default and my computer was just being stupid but if you have that problem here is the answer.
P.S great job Jonathan i really enjoy your tutorials, keep e’m coming
i’m having a really strange problem, when i go to create the array modifier i turn off relative offset and turn on constant offset and when i go to move it along the x axis it moves it on the z axis and vice a versa. why?
hi Jonathan,
i would really like some tutorials about using Duplication in blender 2.5:
# DupliFaces
# DupliFrames
# DupliGroup
# DupliVerts
this would be very cool
Hey I was wondering if you could help me with a problem, basically everything works as you’d expect except that the path has to be scaled up to ridiculous lengths before the rope extends, I’ve tried applying scale on the path, scaling it down in object mode, no luck.
No wait, I was being silly, it was something wrong with the rope orientation or something, fixed now anyways
What did you do to fix it? I am having the same problem.
“The creator of this video has not given you permission to embed it on this domain.
This is a Vimeo Plus feature.”
What does this mean?
Are you seeing this error while trying to watch the video on Blender Cookie or while trying to embed the video on another side? If the latter this is because we’ve disabled embedding outside of Blender Cookie.
-Jonathan
Thanks for another great tut.
I am using 2.58.1 and am having an issue where the Rope does not scale proportionally with the path when it is scaled. Is there anything that you can recommend checking? Seemed to be the same issue that MrJimmyOS was having but thought I would ask the group as well.
Excellent phrase
Great tutorial.
[~ 3:00]:
The orientation of the 3 Circles would be even better if you rotated the one on top 45° before duplicating it three times (because technically, the rotation axis of the lower two should not parallel to any axis, but have an angle of 30° to the y axis).
Also, around 8:00, the crease is not a bug, the Subsurf modifier should be below the Array modifier and everything should look fine (I’m absolutely sure Jonathan knows that by now, just commenting because this is still among the top hits for rope tutorials on Google – and rightfully so).
I’m trying to follow this tutorial in Blender 2.63, and a lot has changed on the interface. For anyone using the same version who got stuck at spin duplicate like I did: I found by Google searching that on the Mesh Tools panel on the left side of the screen you can click “Spin” and then down on the settings for that tool you can change the steps to 9 and tick the box next to “duplicate”, and then as someone mentioned earlier, under Degrees, click on that box and change it from 180 to 360 and that will lay out the pieces right. Now to see how much further I can go before getting stuck due to interface changes again.
Sorry, steps to 3, from 9.
Yep, stuck again. Now at the Knife tool. I’m not seeing any options for multi-cut in 2.63.. and searching Google hasn’t yielded any help. Any suggestions?
Hi Mel,
The Knife tool in 2.63 has been completely rebuilt and is now much more powerful. At what point of the tutorial are you trying to follow? I can give you an alternate method.
Actually, In blender 2.63 you can loop cut all (3)pieces to have a shape like on the video.
very good
On blender 2.67 the knife multicut option i assume is no longer there and I ended up using the loopcut/slide option but when rotated the object became deformed . The only solution was to remove the doubles for the three objects and it worked .