Modern kernmantle climbing rope

Description:

I couldn't find a modern rope anywhere, and found mapping an image on a beveled path to look cheap when in close. So I modeled a modern kernmantle rope with basic geometry and simple materials on each of the four strands. This gets big fast if you have a lot or rope in scene, but it works good even up close. You can add a subsurf if you want more occlusion and sharper thread creases.

Each rope is a ring of weave objects that is dupliframed along a path. If you change the length of the path you will need to adjust both the child mesh's frame end number and the parent path's frames so that they are equal and show no gaps or overlaps.

Each rope has four materials mapped to the threads. You can change these colours to create different patterns on the ropes. Converting to Cycles would be easy - just click Use Nodes on each material and go from there.