Create and animate a realistic looking rope~

[actarus1]

Hi everyone~
I'm going to do a project that animate a realistic looking and motion of rope. The rope is attached with a object which will throw into the sky and then fall to the ground in a parabela motion, so I need to animate the rope have a realistic look about this. I'm now using a lattic to animate a nurbs cylinder and then keyframe the rope, but it's difficult to get a really realistic one, and my teacher told me use softbody and spring to do a rope, but the motion of it is difficult to control, and the result of it much like a rubberband rather than a rope. So how can I do? all views and suggestions are welcome~

Solution

[maos52]

Try cloth.

-=<>=-

[actarus1]

In reply to:
Try cloth.-=<>=-

Hi, can you briefly describe how to do this?

[loial]

It would be easier for you to look at the manuals for Using: Cloth or Instant Maya: Cloth. You should find everything thing you need there There's a lesson on taking a piece of cloth through a loop...probably want to use that same principle.

[twedzel]

Anouther option is to make an spline IK running through the rope, and make the Spline IK curve into a soft bod, tweek from there. Sould eliminate the stretchyness. Just an idea.

[stormtroopar]

I had to create a rope for work a while back and the approach I ended up with was using cloth to drive a cylinder tube, which also drives a paint fx stroke/spline. The paint fx is the actual rendering of the rope. Cloth will give you the most realistic result in terms of rope like motion. It will take much more effort to use softbody to get the right motion. The key is to get the right settings for cloth. Start off with some of their presets and tweak from there. give it a try. At alias's website, there is a tutorial that uses a similar technique, but the tutorial uses it to drive paint fx hair. Check it out, it should help.

[actarus1]

Thank you very much all of your suggestion~
Hi stormtroopar, now I've created a nurbs cylinder and use "make cloth object" to make it to cloth, but I donno how to animate it. My objective is hold one side of the rope ont he ground, and antoher side attach to a object which wil fly parabela over the sky. So what animation technique should I use? and also, using "create cloth object" on a cylinder is a good method or not? since I see the maya html file said using nurbs to "make cloth object" isn't good in sometimes.........

[stormtroopar]

Well, you wouldn't need to use a nurbs cylinder, the cylinder object is only used for an approximation of the cloth animation. Since the final rope is going to be a curve, it is always going to be smooth. So just use a medium res poly cylinder will do. Also your calculation time might be faster too.

If you read the manual, cloth has its own constraints, just animate the parabela like its flying and constaint one side of the cylinder to the parabela and the other end to the ground. After that is run the simulation and tweak the settings for the cloth sim to get what you want.

I suggest you to read through the cloth tutorials and skim the manual. You have the know the system pretty well in order to control your simulation, otherwise, its going to be hard to obtain what you are after. Simulations is a tricky thing, spend the time to go through the manual will save you headaches later on.