lMODELLING CHRISTMAS TINSEL
1. Create a ‘Line’ spline object to act as the path of your tinsel, make sure 'display the render mesh' is ticked, then convert it to an editable-poly.
2. Make a long thin ‘Plane’ object with a few (6 or so) length segments, and move the pivot point to one end by using the ‘Affect Pivot Only’ button in the hierarchy tab.
3. Create a pfsource particle object and make the spline object the emitter using a ‘Position Object’ event, and make the plane the particle type using a ‘Shape Instance’ event.
Particle birth start=0, end=0
Amount: something like 5000-6000 (or obviously whatever makes it bushy enough)
Rotation: World Space, 180 divergence
4. Then convert it to a mesh object via the 'mesher' compound object. (i also took this moment to hide the majority of the mesh in subobject mode as its quite a toll on the pc at this point, you can leave it hidden permanently because it renders whether its hidden or not)
5. Add a ‘Noise’ modifier with a small value to make it more natural looking.
6. Done! (Just make sure you give it a 2-sided material or you'll only see half the strands
[TIP] If you add the noise modifier to the single strand before you add it to the particle system you wont have to convert it all into a mesh object (step 4) and therefore you can keep the particle system customisation for later. I would do it like that but wanted to include the mesher compound object into the tutorial.
I hope this tutorial was useful for you.