Rope Tutorial - Blender Guru

the old method that most people use to create rope involved physically modeling some rope threads and although it creates some semi-nice results we've got some newer features in blender so we can actually create rope that looks better in last time much easier so yeah in this video I'm going to show you how to create rope using a Bezier curve a displacement map from polygon and the new micro displacement feature which will basically result in a rope which is easily controllable and adaptively changes its detail depending on how close the mesh is in relation to the camera so hopefully that sounds pretty cool without further ado go ahead and open up a new scene in blender so we can get started alright so the first thing we're going to be creating is a small segment of the rope so I'm just going to delete everything and I'm going to replace it with a circle okay now this circle is going to make up the you know the diameter of the actual circle so because we're going to be adding a subsurf modifier later on we want to start with something which is very low poly so by default it gives you this 32 vertices thing so make sure that after you've just added in your circle you hit T and you'll see over here vertices change it from 32 to 8 all right now that I've got that I am going to go to front view and rotate it by 90 degrees like so and now I want to create one segment of the rope going out with so in edit mode I'm going to extrude then hit X so that it's snapped to the x-axis and then holding down control you can see that when you hold down control that it snaps it to these sort of grid segments in the background there and you can see it there's these these thick lines and then these faint lines so what I want to do is I want to extrude it out until it hits line three okay so one two three and if you can't see it by the way if you look in the bottom left hand corner you'll see that the numbers appear there so the one that we're looking for actually is three so once you've got that click and if you've got this horrible weird shape shading which you probably will go ahead and select everything and then hit ctrl n sort of a confusing shortcut I guess because in most other applications that would be the new thing hey look I'd actually is huh just noticed that it still is in blender but if you're in edit mode and you select everything it's there what about here yeah okay that's that's that's really dumb in object mode it actually is a new new scene but in edit mode it's a very common function recalculate normals dangerous alright so the reason that I snapped that to line three here is that what I want to do now is create square faces because when you're using displacements as you'll probably know if you've ever seen any of my other tutorials where I use displacements you don't want to have a rectangular face so what I'm going to do is right here I'm going to hit ctrl R and I'm going to scroll up once so that I get two lines then if I click and then it'll be sliding along just right click and it will now snap to its default position which as you can see is directly where those other two lines are which means that we now have square faces who very long roundabout way to just create a cylinder but you know we're getting there all right so now that I've done that I want to create more of the rope so we've got one segment so let's add in an array modifier right here and I wanted to obviously go out to the right there which is the x-axis which by default it is actually set up like that's the x value at the top there the reason that it's putting it underneath right now is that we rotated our circle so if you just hit control a and then apply the rotation it will now be going in the correct direction all right so if we just increase that to 10 I don't know why 10 but that's what we'll go with just for now yeah now let's do some texturing so I'm going to split my view here load up the node editor right here add a new material you could even give it a name if you want to root rope there we go cool so I'm going to add in an image texture right here and I'm going to connect this to the diffuse in right here so you can use any image texture you want for this the one that we're going to be using is from polygon right here polygon comm so you go to polygon calm and just type in rope and you'll see it show up there I could have disliked it there you can see that this is a second time that I've done this tutorial so I already had it up but anyways this is the one right here now the reason that the reason the reason that we're using this from polygon comm is that it's got this all-important displacement map which we created digitally so it's not like one of those methods where it was a photo which was converted to a displacement in which case it's all guesswork basically these lines these these white values and these black values will create a perfectly threaded looking piece of rope so that's why we're using this one here you can download it for free with a trial account anyway so alright once you've downloaded it go ahead and click on open and wherever it is that you've unzipped it to right here you don't need any more than two K by the way like I think it's yet available in four sizes but honestly yeah you unless the cameras right in close to the rope you're not going to need anything more than one or two K anyway I'm using this one which is the color input that's our first one okay so go and load that in and you can see how it's connected it's just going to the diffuse so if you hit shift Z here and then let's just give our rope sink that's right the color to the world so you can actually see it you can see that we can't see our texture on the cylinder at all and the reason for that of course is that we haven't UV unwrapped the rope yet now we are doing UV unwrapping and you might say why like it's a simple shape shouldn't you be able to you know use texture coordinates with generated and you can but it gets weird results especially once you add in the busier curve later for the cylinder to follow so that actually looks like a flexible rope so to make it look perfect we are going to be UV unwrapping it so I'm going to split my view here set this to the uv/image editor down there and what I'm going to do is right here I'm is going to hit control or sorry first of all select one edge like this the one along the bottom there doesn't matter which one you actually select but I like to select the one which is going to be on the opposite side of wherever the camera is and then we're going to hit mark C so that it's just adding a cut right along there so now if I select everything hit you unwrap it's now unwrapped it okay now although this is a tileable texture it doesn't look like it's tiling properly and that's because we're using the array modifier so it's basically treating this segment so that once it hits the end there it's repeating this segment here so basically the way that we would fix this would be to you could scale this up like that so that it fits it properly and there you can see it would actually line up but then you would have another problem here which is that these threads here it looks like there's too many like ideally you want to have what looks like three you know like if this is a piece of rope and you're looking at it front on like you've got three pieces like that when in our case right now looks like we've got six right it's like way too that's a horrible thing to stick in front of the camera but you get the point there's too many threads interwoven in it so I did this deliberately because I want to show you how to fix this part so we're going to fix both of those things right now now the first one is to correct that thing so that it had like instead of it looking like six that there's actually three I'm going to extend this out so that it uses the full part of the of the UV or grid there so if I just go into side view right here and extrude and then just along the x-axis and hold down control until it hits another three lines away from that point this you can see those faint lines in the background there so you can see that I've extended it to three beyond that now if I hit ctrl R and again just like before add in two more loop cuts like so now we have effectively doubled the length of it which you might think why does that matter it will once we do the texturing in a second so if we select everything then hit U and unwrap you would see that you get this and that's because our seam along the bottom there it ended so make sure that you add seen for the rest of it do that again and there we go so now if we have a look at it you'll see that the tiling problem is fixed and it looks as though we've only got one two three there you go we've got three threads instead of there being six so that's how you create sort of the correct scale for the texture for the rope all right oh one problem as well is that you may notice that these threads here are going length ways around the rope which isn't correct if you look at reference photos of actually I don't have any here but let's just say this was my reference photo real rope goes in the direction of the road like the threads sorry the tiny little microscopic threads at the bottom there so currently it's going the wrong way so just make sure that you rotate it 90 degrees if that's the case so that it looks like that all right cool now in order to get it so that it doesn't have this tiling issue basically the ends have to line up perfectly with your UV grid so what I'm doing is I'm just positioning it as best I can so that the end is you know where it needs to be let me just check oh actually okay it's better to actually line it up first of all with the bottom point so that the cursor is right where it needs to be like that and then if you hit shift s and then select selected two pixels it's a very slight thing but it'll just move it to the nearest pixel which is handy so it'll sort of snap it to that and then once I've got it so it's lined up everywhere but the top there I'm just selecting the 2d cursor as the what do you call it the pivot point because there is a cursor in the actual UV image over to there and now if I hit s and then Y when I scale that up I can get it really close to the top there and then just hit shift s selected two pixels and there we go so now we've got a perfectly tiled rope which is using the array modifier which is fantastic good now let's do the the curvy bit right let's make it actually look like rope so that it bends around so I'm going to add in right here I'm going to add in a curve so shift a curve bzr this is it right here so I'm not going to bother fiddling with the shape of this just yet right now all I want is for this rope to actually adhere to the shape of this curve there so with your cylinder selected add in a curve deform modify this one right here okay and then underneath object you want to select the name of that curve or you can click the little eyedropper there and then just click the curve on them on the in the 3d viewport there now once I've done that you can see that it's now it's adhering to the curve you can't really see it because it's way bigger than that so if I scale down my cylinder just the Sun then not the actual curve the Bezier curve underneath it you can see that I can get it down to the right sort of size okay so I'm just sort of four no I mean this is arbitrary really but I'm just making it so that it's like to grid floors wide that's sort of the size of mine alright that's pretty good and whenever you scale something by the way like what I just did then you're scaling measurements here will be totally messed up which can cause problems later on when you get to displacements or other things so just get into a habit of hitting ctrl a and then applying the scale after you have done that and if by the way you ever see that your rope appears to be sort of off like maybe it sort of looks like like this or something that's because you're so on that origin point is that a different origin point to your curve so both the curve and the actual object that's being deformed to it has to have the exact same origin point so if you ever have this happen just select one hit shift s and then make it go to the selection to cursor which in this case is exactly where my curve is like that and then whenever you move them in the future just make sure you move them both together and that's probably so all right cool so now let's do some displacement because you might have noticed looking at this that you know doesn't really it doesn't really look like a rope like far enough away yeah the zigzagging lines sort of confuses your brain into thinking it's a rope but there's no there's no bump to it there's no physical you know the threads which is really important for it to look like a rope so um yeah we're going to do it by using a new feature of liner called micro displacements if you haven't watched my whole tutorial on it that's fine you can check it out in the YouTube description if you wanted to but I'm just going to do it right now so the old method for using displacements was to actually use a modifier over here but the new method actually allows you to connect it directly in the materials which is fantastic because you don't have to bother setting up all this stuff it's just done right here so what we're going to do is hit shift a and add in a new image texture node right here click open and then go back to wherever it is that you've saved your your rope textures and you can see that we've got two displacement textures here which look identical and that's because they are identical but one of them is a tiff file a 16-bit TIFF file and that's just because when you're using displacements sometimes it can actually make a stepping effect with 8-bit files because it's like the color there's not enough light color information anyways so you've got sixteen bits which if you use it you'll avoid that problem so that's the one you should always use anyway click open and now we are going to connect this into the displacement input of our material output node now if you've ever used this input in previous versions of blender you'll know that when you do that all it's really doing is adding like a fake bump like a grayscale fake bump across the surface which is why we can't see any difference right now what we want to do is use a new feature of blender which is actually going to make that physically change the geometry of the rope so the way that you do that is because it's a new feature in 2.78 or whatever first of all you have to make sure that your feature set is set to experimental and when you do that when you go to the material settings down here you'll see something that says displacement if you use if you're watching this at the next release I think you'll just be able to do it when it's set to supported but you should be able to see it there but anyways right now I have to set it to experimental okay and now that I've done that change it from the displacement bond which is default to true and when you do that you might not see a change but if you double tap tab you can see that it has a double tapping tab by the way just goes into edit mode and out of edit mode really quickly and that refreshes the mesh and you'll see that it's now physically changing the shape of the rope doesn't look very good of course because we've got a very choppy low res looking rope so we can fix that very quickly just by adding in a subsurf modifier at the bottom there okay like so and now you can see it looks like one of those potato swizzle things on a stick that you can get it fares it looks like one of those but you'll see that I just want you to notice how it is looking smoother okay so it doesn't look great but it's getting there right once you've added in the subsurf modifier it's giving it more geometry to work with there is another feature which you'll see in the subsurf modifier panel down here there'll be a feature that says adaptive and you'll only see that by the way if you're in experimental mode or a future blender release but when you check adaptive you might not notice that much has changed but what it's going to do is it's going to subdivide the mesh instead of it subdivide like the old method for subdividing was it just apply the blanket amount of detail to the entire mesh so that basically down here would be subdivided as much as out there even though what's out there is far less important than what's at the front there because you won't notice the detail at the back so by using adaptive it's looking at where the camera is and it's adaptively go figure subdividing the mesh depending where the camera is so it's very subtle but you'll see down here there's more detail than what you can possibly notice at the back there it'll be seamless in the final render though you won't notice anything we will save a bunch of of RAM and that that feature by the way this adaptively this micro displacement here that is how you're going to be able to create the rope using this method like this method wouldn't have been good before these features were added because you would just create a rope that's way too high poly but this saves you a lot of time now one other thing to remember whenever you're using any image texture in the node editor over here unless the one unless it's one that is directly contributing to the color of the material everything else needs to be set to non color data so you can see that when I did that when I set this a non color data this now looks different so it's now treating it like it's a grayscale image which it is you remember if you had a look at it it is a grayscale image so it's now able to read those values better that's my way of understanding it but it always looks way better what have you said it's a non color data okay cool now let's change it so that doesn't look like a potato swizzle stick thing another taxable name of that thing they started selling them in Korea I think was a Korean in it no couldn't be in Korea that invented them but yeah they're really they're really popular in Korea and probably most countries anyway yeah to change it from looking like that I'm going to add in a converter mass node so if we drag this and drop this between those two points there and then set this to multiply multiply this is a quick like this is a really easy one whenever you've got something and you want to dial back its value if you just add in this set it to multiply this value here essentially becomes the strength of this value if this makes sense so if you double tap tab you'll see that now we're using it at 50% strength displacement than what it was before so if i dial this back even further and by the way you won't see it unless you refresh the mesh by hitting double tap tab you can see that we now able to make this finally start to look like a real rope which is really cool and there you go really cool um all right let's very quickly just create a very basic scene I'm just going to add in a plane and I'll add in a monkey why not and I'm going to make my rope coil around the monkey just because I know some people will ask you know if I just have this Bezier curve like this like that doesn't look like rope so I want to actually make it you know just somewhat of a practical example so essentially to make this look like rope it's all in the Bezier curve this curve right here so it's just a matter of having a look at reference photos of rope and seeing how rope reacts when it's being coiled up when it's being pulled I had a look at a bunch of different reference photos of what's it called rope on a bow logged you know like next to a like on a jetty or like where boats are tied up there's that little thing this is looking terrible right now but there's that that thing where they tie the rope to to keep the boats from from going away or whatever but yeah I looked at a bunch of reference photo and I just copied sort of how the rope looked okay like this and I'll make it go around the back now this looks really terrible right now and you might notice as well that the curve is now longer than the rope so when that happens you just increase the array modifier like so okay all right so let me just position that there so that it starts to look a little bit I mean working I mean working in 3d is always going to be more awkward than you know if you used to working with curves in Photoshop or whatever because you are going from A to D application to a 3d application so it takes the fun of curves from A to D and then adds another dimension to it so it is always a little bit fiddly just moving around trying to get these curves to line up the way you want them to but that's really that's how but I get how you do it so don't don't worry if it feels awkward and you don't know if you're doing it right yet just a matter of just trying to make it work as best you can like that okay cool and just so that there's an actual nice-looking light I'm going to change it from the default white background or the white background that I set it as before and I'll just add a little lamp here like that alright and there we go so now we've got a rope going around the Suzanne head alright so a couple of things I want to change okay so for starters I mean I probably want there to be I want there to be some more to this rope so I'm just taking that front point and I'll just move that around like there all right and then this increase the array to reflect that okay there we go but the other thing I want to change that I want there to be a little bit more detail to the rope because you'll notice that you know from far away it looks really cool like you've got it's actually rope which is deforming to the shape that rope should but when you zoom in you haven't got that detail they're like these threads these little sub threads of the main threads they look a little bit like a photo so we want there to be some actual bump to like some fake bump to our real bump and it just so it turns out there is that feature so underneath displacement you remember that by default it was set to bump and when it's set to bump you can see it's doing that fake bump which is that high detail fake bomb on top but if you set it to both it's doing both obviously so it is um actually we don't have it on both before maybe I already did anyway I think my camera is really close so it is struggling to catch up hopefully the computers in crash mmm that's the one one thing you have to be careful of when you're working with adaptive subservice is like if the camera is super close to the mesh it can sometimes like subdivide it a lot which I think it has done in this case let me see copying bb-8 Wow to take in forever okay there we go whoa look at that okay so now we've got both okay so it was set to bump before announced that then it was true announce it to both and there you go so that looks good so that's great now there is one other thing as well you might want to do and that is to give some gloss like a little tiny little bit of shine to the rope because I was watching some gum grab a game grumps before this and I was just typing it in there but if you look at real photos of rope like this one here you can see there's a very very like it doesn't look like it it's mostly diffused but as a very tiny amount of shine just on the edge there and the other thing that you'll notice with fabric is that it sometimes has like Afrin ell effect like a sort of fuzzy velvety sort of edge right so again very icy you probably see it better in this photo just on the edges there it just looks a little bit lighter than it does elsewhere just a very subtle amount so we can do both of those very easily so I'm going to add in a mixed shader right here and I'll add in a glossy shader right underneath it alright and not at this value unless you wanted to make it look like wet rope but I'm going to go really really low like point zero one because we're in our photo you can barely notice it like right here just barely notice a subtle amount of gloss there like this roughness is probably okay so I'll use that and then for that that very fuzzy edge I'm going to add in a Freneau effect and I'm just going to make it impact the color of our rope here so if I add in a mix RGB node like that and then a Fornell node like this drag that into the top input there to the factor input and then when I set this to screen this now becomes this value here becomes the strength of that fuzziness effect so if I just actually let's just select that hit em that'll now mute the gloss shader so it's just using the diffuse right and I'll just dial that back so basically however Oh No no I crashed well that's what happens when you use an experimental feature all right geez that I had to rebuild the entire scene because I forgot to save the more you learn right anyways I wanted to the reason I remade the whole thing anyway is because there's one other step that I wanted to tell you and that's that you can see these little gaps here in the rope that's because the array system there's you know putting them in to end so you need to check merge and then merge the vertices when they're close enough and then you don't get that that little sectioning happened there which is good but yeah that's basically it we've got a little bit of gloss tiny man lost a little bit of fur for the fern Elm that was the other thing I was explaining like if you want to control how much Fornell actually appears on it this value here essentially becomes that for now I didn't even save this actually how much oh yeah I have to save it okay good I just did the same thing that crashed it before okay yeah because once this is set to screen it's now only going to take screen it's only going to take the white values so turning that down essentially becomes the opacity of that fluffy furnace sort of effect there that's pretty much it so essentially that's how you make rope and the good thing about this method is is that because it's using this adaptive subdivision you can have the camera really far away you know and you'll get a very low res looking mesh and you can see when i zoom in there that it's using this choppy sort of low res mesh tool in order to look that low res but then also when the camera gets in really close it's now going to smooth it out so no matter where you are in the scene you're going to get an optimized mesh and it's going to look so we're really sweet so for my final render I did a couple of other things to it I see only one other thing extra and that was to add some fluffiness like some individual strands to the rope which you can do very easily by adding in a particle system here set this to hair check advanced and then use modifier stack so that it actually uses this whole modifier stack and yeah basically doll is down to a hair length which is acceptable it's sort of around about that I think I went Li 10,000 obviously it depends on how long your rope is how long speech is correct can't believe I said that I just popped into my head then underneath here where is it where's the rent I'll render right here changes so it's got a random amount and a little bit of brown in so that it makes them sort of squiggly looking here is instead of perfectly straight hairs and then you set the scaling value right there you set that down to something that makes sense the point zero two perhaps or point zero one even but yeah that's basically there is one downside though to using these hairs is that by having particle hairs its moves it to the bottom of the modifier stack and the adaptive subdiv only works if it is the last thing in the stack and then when you move it above that and I'm pretty sure this is a bug into point seven eight but it won't actually display it so yeah if I want the adaptive subdiv and I want particles I basically had to make them a separate curve here which was only the only the hair there and I basically deleted the hair from the one underneath it like so and then I got both at the same time which I don't have why does that happen all probably because I've got all that again so yeah fix that and now I've got both so that was a little workaround but yes that's basically the hair so arm that's the Rope guys if you enjoyed this tutorial please give it a thumbs up on YouTube how other people find it and to see more tutorials like this one go ahead and click Subscribe thank you for watching and I will see you next time fight

Channel: Blender Guru

Views: 551,539

Keywords: blender, tutorial, rope, microdisplacements

Id: 1drRNphACMc

Length: 30min 42sec (1842 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 24 2017