This was just an idea that struck me while I was cooking dinner this evening... not the image itself, but an idea for a way to do a dForce-enabled pearl necklace without using hundreds of rigid follow nodes for the pearls. Instead... I just made a hexagonal-cross-section strand, thick enough that the collision offset didn't get problematic, and then threw a displacement map on it that's just a series of white-to-black-to-white gradients, with the levels shifted so that the white stripes get wider and the black narrower. Tweak the displacement amounts, tweak the number of horizontal tiles, and boom. Pearls. They're not perfectly round, and that's going to really bother me at some point, but for now, I like them.