animated rope plugin

[Mohammad Dashti]

Hi
I think you can use Beam Plug-in this is a very good Plug-in for create Rope and light saber.

[Jamesc]

Thanks Mohammad, that would do for tightly stretched rope – but I am wanting “hanging” rope.

[Quejet]

Yah you want something physical! Well I’ve personally never heard of anything that is capable of doing what you want
but just because that someone hasn’t made the plug in doesn’t mean you cant make it yourself.

Firstly consider your options. What if you were to take some footage of rope dangling across the room and key that in instead? That would definitely look very good.

Another option would be to use masks and stroke, animate the mask ever so slightly to produce the dangling rope effect

if this isn’t any good, then… well its something…
you could use expressions to create the physics yourself. But there really aren’t that many people out there willing to go so far for such an effect.

I think your best bet is the masks.

[Rhett Robinson]

Okay, easier to make a more realistic rope in a 3D app, but in a few moments, I made one quick comp using the “beam” plugin, precomped it and applied the “CC Bender”, adjusted the start and end to slightly outside the ends of the beam, and it was fairly convincing. If it was my project, I would probably create very simple expressions using the pickwhip to make the bender endpoints follow the beam endpoints with a little offset added, and probably add a second expression that’s sort of a “random” within a range of values for the amount of bend… a little digging on Dan’s site will get you there in a hurry.

Good luck

[Nicholas Toth]

AE CS3 has a bone/puppet system.

Its not bad, definately not perfect, but all in all I think it’ll give you what you’re looking for.
Download the demo, see if you dig it, and you’ll have 30 days to figure out if it is worth the investing. Personally, i really could have used it a few months back.

I’ve had a lot of luck with ccbend/ccbendit with applications like that.

Nicholas Toth
Freelance Animator
nicholastoth.com

[Rhett Robinson]

Ooooh
I didn’t know that. I played with the demo (about 2 days out of the 30) but was getting adjusted to the interface and didn’t get any further, so I’m still in 6.5

That’s a nice addition; I may have to check it out further – thanks for the tip!