Rope curve brush

Here are the steps of the tutorial with graphics in a single image that you can save or pin to your Pinterest board of references if you like:

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Here is the tutorial in a nutshell. These are the steps reduced to simple bullet points:

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Set up geometry for IMM brush:

• Load up a Cylinder from the 3D primitives
• From the Initialize settings, set the HDivide and VDivide to 8 for both
• Convert Primitive to PolyMesh 3D
• Use the Gizmo 3D to scale the cylinder in the Y-axis to double its size (hold shift to snap)
• With the ZModeler or the selection tools, delete the top and bottom polygons of the cylinder
• Use the UV master (from the plugins palette) to Unwrap the cylinder and create a quick UVmap
• From the ‘gear icon’ on the Gizmo 3D select the ‘Twist’ Modifier. Use the cone control at the top and push it all the way down to 180 degrees.
• Use the Gizmo to duplicate the cylinder in the X or Z axis by holding Ctrl while using the arrows. (make sure you leave a small gap between the cylinders).
• Clear the mask. And use the ‘Location’ icon to snap the Gizmo to the centre of both cylinders and then the ‘Home’ icon to centre them to the grid.
• Bring back the twist modifier and ‘untwist’ both cylinders using the cone control at the bottom and pushing it upwards to 180 degrees.

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Creating an IMM Rope brush

• Switch perspective ON and use the “shift key” to rotate around to snap the camera to the front view of the two cylinders.
• With our geometry ready, select the brush palette and expand the ‘Create’ subpalette and click on
• Create InsertMesh button.
• Now we can simply turn the InsertMesh brush into a curve brush from the Stroke palette, by enabling the ‘Curve’ switch.
• To avoid gaps between instances of the brush, go to the Brush > Modifiers and turn the ‘Weld points’ switch ON
• Also, disable Tri Parts and enable stretch

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Rope refinements and details

• Once you create the rope, you can use something like the Inflate slider from the deformation palette, to tighten the ‘twists’ of the rope.
• Also, the IMM brush should have kept the UVs that we generated with the single cylinder, just make sure that the object you are using to draw the curve from, also has UVs.
• Now you can use the Noisemaker to add details to the rope. (you can spend more time generating a clean
• UV map if you want to make the surface details match between the brush instances).
• For an additional level of details, you can add some FiberMesh to the curve.