Copying geometry to vellum string (making rope)

[nomojosh]

Hi, I'm trying to sim lots of rope on a ship and although I can simply use polywire, I'd like to try and keep the original model's rope geometry.
Is there a way to use path deform or point deform to achieve this result? I've had some success with point deform, but I think it was more luck and not really a robust workflow.

I've attached a simple scene of some vellum string in a breeze and an alembic file of some rope.
As you can see the rope is horribly distorted.

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks

Rope.zip

[kushaldas]

Look into using a Wire Capture and setting the appropriate weights on your rope geo and then feeding that into a Wire Deform, similar to how you would set up a Point Deform. You'll need to have the curve that you're feeding into your vellum sim match the shape of the high res rope that you're trying to deform in order to get this to work as intended

[nomojosh]

11 hours ago, kushaldas said:

Look into using a Wire Capture and setting the appropriate weights on your rope geo and then feeding that into a Wire Deform, similar to how you would set up a Point Deform. You'll need to have the curve that you're feeding into your vellum sim match the shape of the high res rope that you're trying to deform in order to get this to work as intended

Thanks Kushaldas, that looks like the right direction. I'd not heard of wire capture/deform.

It works perfectly if, as you say, I feed perfect geo into it (like a polywire made from the curve used in the vellum sim). But Trying to get it to work with the rope model is less successful. It's close, but no matter how much I try to eyeball it, it drifts away from the vellum line within in a few frames.

Is there a way to create a curve from the rope geometry? My VEX isn't great so I'm wondering if I could use Extract Centroid from pieces in a loop?

I'll play around, but again, any ideas are welcome!
Cheers

EDIT: I had a quick stab at it by using scatter to put points 'roughly' along the rope. It doesn't work but it illustrates what I'm after.

link to new scene
 

Edited July 14, 2022 by nomojosh
added new scene

[Benyee]

just try deforming it manually, here are some tips

Rope_example_v2.hiplc

[Fenolis]

For each connected piece of geometry, use Straight Skeleton 3D (from Labs)

[nomojosh]

On 26/09/2022 at 8:32 AM, Fenolis said:

For each connected piece of geometry, use Straight Skeleton 3D (from Labs)

Thanks, I'll take a look. It's always interesting to see different techniques to achieve the same result

Also, I managed to get wire deform to work so I'll post an update hip later for future ref

[Fenolis]

Check out this method: