Barber Pole Style Animation

[Robb63]

I have a series of pulleys with cable around them that I need to animate. The pulleys are an easy rotation animation, but the cable moving is another story as they loop around the pulleys. I thought a good way to handle it was to break the cable into its straight sections, then rotate them along their axis with a spiral material on them which would give me a look like a barbershop pole. I've tried assigning a spiral pattern to them, and then cutting the cable up so that it has two different colors twisted around each other. Neither one seems to rotate at all!

In the attached image the blue white spiral is mapped, and the red/blue spiral is data.

Am I wrong is thinking that would give me a barber-pole animation if I rotate the parts along the vertical centerline?

[Rex]

Hey Robb,

I have attached a barber pole example animation and the accompanying scene. I created the color map with the lattice polygon procedural. I'm not sure why you're having trouble. If you can't figure out your issue after taking a look at the attached scene then send yours over and I'll have a look.

Rex

[Robb63]

Hey Rex, thanks so much. I had no idea there was a lattice procedural, or that you could do this with it!!
I did discover that mine weren't appearing to rotate because I only had them turning 360 degrees during the animation, and it was too subtle. Once I turned it up to 2400 degrees it was more apparent.

I still want to use the material you came up with though as it looks better than the material I created. However, my model is much larger than the example you posted, and am having a hard time scaling up the stripes. Which of the parameters in the texture color will allow me to do that? I don't quite understand what the adjustments do. Either not much seems to happen when I change the numbers, or the stripe make a huge change that I don't seem to be able to control.

Thanks again for your help on this!

[Rex]

Robb,

Yes the procedural textures can be very versatile!

Try the following and let me know how it goes:

1. Apply Procedural Lattice Polygon to color texture.
2. Change mapping type to Cylindrical.
3. Reduce "Spacing V" until shapes become vertical solids. (.1 seems to work fine)
4. Adjust "Lattice Angle" to desired value.
5. Adjust "Shape Rotation" to align with Lattice Angle. (90 degrees - Lattice Angle = Shape Rotation i.e. 90 - 15 = 75)
6. Adjust "Scale" to desired value. Notice there are "sweet spots" that do not produce a seam. 1 and 5 work for me but these sweet spots aren't necessarily whole numbers.
7. Adjust "Radius" to control the gap in between stripes. (.25 produces equal diameter of stripes and gaps)
8. Adjust "Falloff" to desired value. (Use 0 for hard edges)

Rex