This talk presents an animation-friendly, procedural solution for animating ropes in the movie, The Sea Beast. With over 5000 ropes on our hero tall ship, we embarked on the development of a better rope rig for our animators. This rig would allow them to animate and interact with intuitive controls while preserving the length of the rope so that it would not stretch or appear rubbery. This new rope rig was critical to the believability of our world, considering the massive number of ropes in so many shots. With this new rig, we were even able to final some shots in animation.

Paper in the ACM Digital Library