Does anybody have anything like this (post with rope) they can share, or point me to a place I can purchase it? I looked, but I couldn’t find anything.
should be simple with two cylinders for the posts and a spline wrapped around them
I tried, but I wasn’t getting realistic results. I will give it another college try tonight.
were you using displacement maps or bump maps on the rope to make it look more realistic? good rope textures should sell it
Easy enough really - to make a rope you need to use two helix splines as your weave and then path deform them along another spline for the actual direction of your rope. Either that or just use a normal spline for the rope, and then use a heavily tiled gradient ramp rotated 45 degrees off axis. Or use elfs map and stop wasting time doing things the long way around 
http://www.3dknot.com/tutorials/3dsmax/making-a-realistic-rope-texture/
if you want to do it the hard way
little far from the post but looking good