[Randy Johnson]

Is Hair turned on in the render settings?

[Randy Johnson]

Nice model.
Not sure ik is the way for this one. There are some really good rigging tutorials at c4dportal and at c4dcafe. There is also a perfect tutorial about driver animation at lynda.com but that ones not free.
If you put up a working file I could play around with it on monday.

/randy

[Randy Johnson]

I would use a sweep nurbs like you discribed and add a texture with displacement in it.
Make sure to check sub-polygon displacement.

[Randy Johnson]

Sounds good.
/randy

[Randy Johnson]

Atom Array takes each edge and makes a cylinder of it then on each point you get a sphere.
So if you take a cylinder remove the caps give it lots of height segments then select all the polygons then in function take triangulate then set an atom array as the parent. In the atom array attributes you can change the size of the spheres and cylinders.

Another way to get a mesh would be two sweep nurbs made of helix and circles going opposite ways.

/randy

[Randy Johnson]

triangulating the geometry with a atom array would do the job i assume.
make sure you have lots of sub divisions.

/randy

[Randy Johnson]

I would say I use advanced render and mocca in every project and hair is pretty useful too…and fun
/randy

[Randy Johnson]

I ended up going with two seperate solutions, for the place where i need extra detail I am using cloth (thanks to 3d kiwi) and where i am further away I have a displacment map and animated the bump.
Now i am compositing them in shake with the rest of the scene…seems to work.
thanks
/randy

[Randy Johnson]

Zach,
Your getting a little past sweep nurbs now. Animating a rope has a few options
1) rigging it with soft ik activated this gives a nice control and is the easyest for animating but will require a lot of effort to set up. Tutorial here:
https://www.c4dportal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1208
2)Use hair it is a little render intensive but is super easy to set up…there is a tutorial here:
https://www.base80.com
3)For a simple animation with less detail might be PLA(point level animation)…make the rope with a sweep nurbs then key frame some points you move by hand.

I think I saw a tutorial for this at the cafe too but I dont remember exactly.
Tip for making a rope texture is to use a gradiant that goes back and forth between black and white as many times as possible in the displacement layer.Make sure they angle a little bit otherwise you will get rings rather than a twist.

/randy

[Randy Johnson]

AO render times will kill you unless you bake them into the texture…Brian Jones gave me a great answer on how to do just that …just search my posts for baking.

/randy