I thought so too, so here's the result! imgur.com/jESiZy9

@@3dmarkaa nice work! Looking at real ropes I think there should be less twist in the "second generation" of strands. Nice that this way it is so easy to change things. If this should be anything but a technique example, there would need to be some variation in thickness or the twists to look realistic (depending on what kind of rope this should be). But giant steel cables for bridges do look very regular I think. It's fun that it's possible to work in Maya like the procedural modeling workflow in Houdini.

You should search and add Sweep mesh on the plug-in manager!

Well, not quite. A quick way to see how this won't be the perfect center of the cylinder is to just create a 5-sided cylinder with the default settings. If you go to the top view, you'll see that the midpoint between those edges is off center by a fair amount, as it doesn't intersect with the (0,0,0) origin point. You could, however, make each a 6-sided sweep mesh, and delete 2 adjacent edge loops, and then place an edge loop in that center. That should give you a good mid-point