Looking for advise on modeling/faking lots of rope Another question for my Titanic model. I’m wondering how to efficiently add the rope arches on the lifeboats. My first thought is using curves and an array modifier to add long cylinders with a rope texture, but I’m worried that’ll add to much geometry to my already geometry-heavy model. Another thought was faking it with a flat/displaced texture, but I’m not sure if that’ll work as I want to make my model explorable at some point (so people will be able to see it up close). I might just fake it and make it more convincing at a later date, but I was wondering if I’d be able to do it now/soon.
best way to do so imho would be to use normal maps over simple geometry (curves in this case), you may find it out hard to keep the correct uv coordinations, so you may use either the Mapping node in materials node editor or convert it them to geometry and do the uv's properly. First way seems to be more legit.