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Low poly wire rope


sputnik421

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I have been asked to make a traveling crane for FNV, but can't find a tutorial with a good method of making a low poly wire rope. Has anyone found a good tutorial for these? I can only find ones that use huge numbers of polys, and the loft modifier at the moment.
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Hi!

 

Maybe you can get it to look ok with a cylinder and a good normal map on it.

The silhouette of the cable will look flat though but at least the light reflection on it will give the illusion of wound cables.

 

For smaller lowpoly wires and strings and stuff its good to use a segmented plane subbed down the middle and bent so that it will have thickness from all angles. The texture can use alpha transparency to hide the outer edges of the plane. I did this for shoelaces on my armor.

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Hi!

 

Maybe you can get it to look ok with a cylinder and a good normal map on it.

The silhouette of the cable will look flat though but at least the light reflection on it will give the illusion of wound cables.

 

For smaller lowpoly wires and strings and stuff its good to use a segmented plane subbed down the middle and bent so that it will have thickness from all angles. The texture can use alpha transparency to hide the outer edges of the plane. I did this for shoelaces on my armor.

 

That sounds like the a good idea not sure I can quite visualise doing it, Can you send me a link to the file if it's ok to have a look, your armour to see what you did? You have given me another idea of something to try though thanks.

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Hi!

 

 

 

Ok here is a picture of it. Note that in blender the double sided texturing does not appear in 3d view. I am in edit mode so you can see the geometry, vertices and have the textures on.

The tubular mesh in the center has the parts of the shoelaces that cross over the outside of the lace holes on the outside of the upper layer and the laces that cross underneath on the inside of the lower layer.

I think this scheme resulted in a much lower poly count than it would have if i had tried to model the shoelaces without using transparency.

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I think I need a bit more geometry than you have used there, but the idea you gave me seems to work. It gives about 4x less polys than any other method I have found looking on youtube, I am still going to be on my limit for polys for FNV though.
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Make a high poly model of it.

Bake the model.

Apply the normal map to a low poly tube.

use baduk's tutorial on rigging ( his snake tutorial is fantastic!)

see if you can get it to use working collision in game - just for the experience.

 

 

- winning?

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Make a high poly model of it.

Bake the model.

Apply the normal map to a low poly tube.

use baduk's tutorial on rigging ( his snake tutorial is fantastic!)

see if you can get it to use working collision in game - just for the experience.

 

 

- winning?

 

I have not been able to find baduk's tut but I have found this one that seams to fit the bill.

 

cgtextures.com Creating a rope texture

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Thanks I thought the community might like it, as we are always looking for ways of getting the best look from low poly models.
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