Unwrapping Cable?

I know I have a ton of questions, hope that's alright. I'm working on ropey things in Blender and I want to figure out how to unwrap a cable/rope and apply a tiled texture to it. The online tutorials I've searched aren't helping...
 
For a beginner, shapes like this will make you want to tear your hear out. Try the automatic unwrap Function and after that export the UV File as a .png, so you can have it in GImp for example as layer 1 and on layer 2 you apply the textures over it. After that you can delete layer 1 and et voila you have a working texture for your model.
 
Thank you. I can get the cable unwrapped I just don't know how to position it so that the texture tiles properly across the whole thing.
 
After the UV unwrap, split the View:

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Go to UV Image Editor.

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make sure that in edit mode all the vertecies are selected then click:

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Export UV Image.

Load it in Gimp for example, open a new Layer and then...

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When I unwrap a curved "rope" I get this:

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In order to use a small tiling rope texture, I need to straighten the curved islands evenly and then find a way for it to tile properly. That's where I'm getting stuck. :(
 
Here's an example of cables: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1718154128

What you need to do is make a stretched UV layout, the way it is, you just waste precious texture space,
with cylindrical objects like this, either you unwrap them early in the modeling process, before you bend them
or you have to do them manually, either way you need to fill as much of the UV space as possible.

If you wait a week or two, i can prepare the models i've done and release them as templates, that way you could get right to texturing them.
 
Okay, so say I unwrapped before curving and my smart-uv layout turned into the below. (Ignore the end caps for now.) I want to take the texture showing up behind to resize and position in a way that tiles across the rope without stretching weird. Is there an easy way to do that?

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well there is an option in gimp that let's you resize and turn the image.. you want to look at this section in gimp:

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the first lets you turn your image, the second resizes it, the third sheers it and the fourth lets you stretch it in a desired direction.
 
I tried out the Youtube tutorial from Blender Guru on making rope using a simple shape and array/curve modifiers and it worked out so much better! Thank you all for your help.
 
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