Decided to share my brush idea (also attaching brush) so that others might experiment and make it look more like the metallic metal rope.

Decided to give it another shot and created a slightly better rope brush. No preview, so you have to take this one by faith.

Thanks Lyle. If it's better than the first it must be exceptional!

path-waves here: http://gimp-path-tools.sourceforge.net/

Thank you ofnuts

For those of us who don't have a single cell of artistic blood.....a resounding yes, it has to be a filter. At the very least, a process, or brush or something.

Close but no cigar. I don't know what you started with, or if that is comprised of several strands and then "bent". Still needs the twist. Might make a good starting point for a few more steps. Still a good attempt.

Very interesting approach Rod, might make a cool looking alternative to the pic I posted. I'm afraid your skills surpass mine in the "curve"department. I made a single strand thinking I could maybe make a brush but even using the curve-bend filter I could not get it to look right.

Lyle - I think that's the best looking rope I've ever seen and it does have a metallic look to me.
Looking at the end of the rope I see the five circles you used and the rotation produces the twist. Very cool indeed. Wish there was a way to "stretch" out the pattern to produce elongated strands. I tried to do something similar but we won't go there. Complete disaster.

I have a feeling that someone is going to nail this if we can just keep folks interested long enough and not give up.

Yeah; the elongated strands just stumps me; hopeing the twirling circles (not my idea) can be coaxed to produce those strands and maybe someone here can take the lead; even metalize the rope. lol

Here is something I did two years ago.



It is the concept for a tight 7-strand fiber rope - 6 outer strands and a core strand. Wire rope has a much slower twist, especially the 3-strand one that Draconian posted.

- The new brush dynamics should make it easier to stroke the individual strands with a realistic twist.

- Then you need to mask each strand. The bottom of a strand is masked by the previous strand while the top of a strand masks the previous strand (or is masked by the top of the next strand). Alpha to Selection and windowing the selection to the bottom or top will give you a the curves you need to mask a strand. The mask will be identical for all strands, so you only need to make one and then shift the selection for each strand.



That's the way I have/would approach the problem.

bkh1914 you may have hit on something. Perhaps a blending of Rod's technique and yours then applied like Lyle's brush. You got me thinking of how to do it now. Thanks. Gotta go play with that idea, I'll post something in a little while.

Looks good at first glance, but then my amateur sailor eye catches that the strands aren't twisted in the right direction...

I think I'm getting close.

Step 1. Made a skinny rectangular selection with rounded corners and applied Rod's Steel_Cable_RD gradient.



Step 2. Filters>Distort>Curve Bend and just played around until I got it to look half way decent.



Step 3. Made a GIH brush set to Incremental and a spacing of 10 and made a horizontal stroke.



Step 5. Cropped the result and added a copper colored layer and dulicated it. The first one set to Overlay and the top one to Dodge and 50% Opacity.



Step 6. Merged everything and duplicated it. Moved the duplicate to the right until it looked like one piece then Alpha to selection and cropped the original.

Step 7. Got rid of the duplicate layer and duplicated the altered original twice and moved them into position to the right to make a longer cable.



Getting there. Now to make a cable out of the strand. Might need your help to twist these Rod.

Draconian you pretty much have it already. Just take that strand and re curve it the same way you made the brush. Then do what you just did...again.
What you have now looks like a rope and looks pretty good to me.Add metal overlay and some noise and i think it will pass.

Thanks Rod. As soon as I completed it I tried Curve-Bend again but it distorted it so badly I gave up on it. Now that I'm back from the grocery store, I might try I-Warp or some other method. I have no clue how you twisted yours.

I used Map Object-> Cylinder with some sine curves to get my effect. Rotate around y axis makes it easy and formulaic.

Filters>Theirs>Pan to Bow (45 degrees)
But it only bends one spot and that is in the center. I wonder if the script could be adapted to work on one particular end of the layer (thread) somehow?

I tried IWARP, Curve Bend, and Curve Bend Between Paths. None worked for me. Filters>Distort>Twist showed a bit of promise but i didn't fool with it too much.

I suppose if you bend one end slightly (curve bend) , and then just rotate the thread after that might work.

Twist and Pan to Bow are both available via the gimp plugin registry.

OK; I believe I succeeded in a single thread metal rope strand. I even have (well pretty sure know) how to create a twisted rope using it with ranks with offsetted brush, but more then way too extremely lazy to do it so I pass that on to the less lazy.

Yes, I scaled down the rope.

Thanks for the heads up on the two filters. When you first mentioned them I thought they were native to 2.8 and would not work in 2.6 like so many others right now. I'll have to experiment with these new toys now.

OK; I did figure out how to twist 3 wires, but didn't realize that I should have doubled the number of sets (used 9 sets; should have done 18). The rank idea might have worked, but couldn't figure out how to do it that way, so just copied the brush into 3 locations and rotated them for 9 changes in 120 degs (again wish I did 18 changes). Much more work then I would care to do again. May not find a use for this brush, but sharing it here anyway. If anybody knows a quick way to multiply the transitions without have to do this manually, please let me know. Note that the small individual strand needs to spin at a faster rate then the overall 3 wire twist. Very challenging though I did figure it out, I had to do it manually and 27 total transitions was painful enough so there's gotta be a better way, but I am way too tired to figure that one out right now. lol

Good night.