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.
Support the site – Download includes:
- High resolution video – .mov/h.264
- .blend file at the state of the tutorial
Subscribe to our Blender RSS Feed to receive our latest articles and education from Blender Cookie.
11 Comments
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?