Rope drawing with few bytes

Rendering
1

I am trying to draw sailing ships, and with details the files are big easily approach 1 Gigabyte. I could easily draw ropes, but they also fill big files. So my question is:

“Is there rendering possibility which can give a simple tube the appearance of rope?”

Happy with any answers, OP.

2

The short answer is yes you can texture cylinders to give the appearance of rope. You’ll have to find or make the textures for that, though.

3

Thank you so much for your answer! Could I ask how I make new textures for Rhino? I have not found a relevant description how to do that.

4

Well it’s a huge topic far beyond the scope of just Rhino, there is lots of general information out there. They’re just pictures that get wrapped on to your surface. You can quite possibly find texture maps online, or a whole material, or you could model up a high-detail section of rope–make that a section of rope that’s sort of rolled out flat–and render it. You’d make a color image that’s the overall color, then a greyscale image with really flat lighting that’s your “bump map,” so that the rope doesn’t look like it’s just a cylinder with a picture on it, which works great until you get super-close to it.

Another topic is how to set the mapping parameters so that the textures are tiled properly.

Basically “rendering” is an entire separate field from modeling that has just as big a learning curve…

5

Thank you for your time writing a full answer, and inspiring me to start climbing the (rope) learning curve …
OP

6

Well I have done this exact task, including a script to automatically set the tiling right based on the length of the rope, but I can’t technically share that…though someone else might knock one out for you in 10 minutes…

7

Hei Orlando -

I just wanted to add to Jim’s answer that you don’t need to create the tubes. You can just draw the lines or curves, and, in the Properties panel, enable Curve Piping. That will create the render mesh for the ropes and display the material in renderings.
Mvh,
-wim

8

True, though I think when I did this years ago the mapping options didn’t work right?