IFW Lightwave Textures 
Tutorial Five - Making a Simple Rope 
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Introduction  
Tutorial Two Picture One (27K) I was asked, recently, on the [textures] mailing list whether we could produce a rope texture. I thought about this and realised maybe this could be achieved using IFW Spiral. Here's what I tried.

  Download the rope scene (45K)
               
Part 1 - Making A Simple Rope Object
The first thing to do is make a rope object so in the modeller select add disk. Select Numeric Entry and set the Segments to 100 the bottom to 0m and the top to 2m. Make sure the cylinder, our rope, is along the X axis and make the XYZ radii all to 1 cm. Click on OK and then make the object. To complete the object select Surface from the Polygon tab and call it Rope make the color a ropey brown and click on Smoothing. Once this is done save the object as SimpleRope.lwo.
               
Part 2 - Boning the Rope

In layout load the SimpleRope.lwo object. Go to the top view and zoom in so that the rope object fills the screen. Select Bones and then Draw Bones. Draw out the first parent bone from the far left of the object towards the right for about 0.5m. The using the numeric panel set the following for the parent bone. Position 0m, 0m, 0m; Rotation 90,0,0; Rest Length 20cm. Click on Add Child Bone nine times so that there are bones running along the length of the rope (10 in total). Finally, go to the object skeleton dialog box and enable all ten bones.
               
Part 3 - Surfacing the Rope

Bring up the surfacing panel, select the Rope surface and add IFW_Spiral. Select the IFW_Spiral options and set the size to 0.04, 0.04, 0.04. Change the Axis to the X Axis. Go to the color options and uncheck all four colors and select the wave type as Scallop. Also, try adding IFW_Dirt using the default parameters to dirty the rope up a bit. Finally, position the object to -1,0,0 so that the rope is in the middle of the scene and save it as BonedRope.lwo and save the scene as BonedRope.lws.
               
Part 4 - Completing The Scene

The only thing left to do is position the rope, set the scene and render. Also, rather than using bones a morph target can be used instead. In the modeller create a second rope by a rail extrude or manipulating the ordinal rope. Load this into layout and use it a morph target. Remember to check the Morph Surface check box so that the spiral rope pattern is tacked to the surface.