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Hi there, in this tip we're gonna take a quick look at a way to create a bundle of wires
that you might be stringing along another object. So...
let's go to the top view to get started
I'm going to just create a B-Spline,
a very simple shape
that'll be our path that are wires take.
So once we have this path, we can then
create our cross-section for the wires.
So the easiest way to create the cross section is actually from the...
front view.
So we would use some Splines, and for this bundle of wires it will be
two circular wires and one flat wire.
So I just create one circle and then I can Control-drag and create a second circle
maybe the second circle is a bit smaller
and then there's a flat wire,
so we can create that by creating a rectangle
and we can then tweak it's settings
so we make its height a bit more than its width...
and we and add some rounding to it...
to give it that sort of flat cable look
and
typically we might
do some more adjustments to it but for now that's OK.
so we have these three
wires of different thicknesses and sizes
and if we wanted to make all three of these go along this object, we can use
"our friend" the "Connect" object again
so we can just choose a Connect object
and then we can put all three of these cross sections in the connect object and
Cinema 4D will see it as one object
so then we have to create a SweepNURBS
all of this may seem familiar to you, but there's a twist I'm going to add
so here we have our Connect object which is our cross-section
and then we have
these wires...
It doesn't look too great right now but there's a really cool trick that you
can do with the SweepNURBS object that makes it look a lot better
it's the uh...
"End Rotation"
So you can actually apply rotation
to the SweepNURBS object...
now typically, if these wires are going to be
strung along together
they would be swept together like this
and that does create a pretty cool effect
now there are some downsides to this approach...
One thing is that you can't actually color them individually.
if i wanted to make one wire purple and one wire green
there's really no way do that because there's only one SweepNURBS object
but the good part is that you can just
run these wires anywhere you want
and the twist sort of holds up
so the only thing you might need too
is to
increase the twist if the cable gets too long
now we're seeing another bit of "artifacting" right here so I'd like to take a
second to talk about that
what's happening here is that because this is a pretty straight section of
cable
there's not enough subdivisions
to properly twist this cable
and the way that we can fix that is by going into edge mode so we can see some
of the edges there is way too many edges here as it is, so we can reduce some of
those
we can go to our Connect object
and
change this to... (fifteen degrees usually works for me) let's do twenty [degrees]
Twenty degrees so we can see what's happening. There's a lot of geometry here to
bend and twist but there's really none here
so what we can do is select our Spline and change the
intermediate points method
we can change it from 'Adaptive' to 'Natural' that sort of helps. We can go to
'Uniform'
that helps a little bit more
but if we go to 'Subdivided' it's really the best at this point we can choose
how often it gets subdivided
so if we choose seven or eight
it'll be subdivided every eight units in this case every eight inches
and if you were too
make this
cable a lot longer
you may have to apply more twist...
that's pretty much the only thing that you need to do
so we would go to the SweepNURBS and we would just apply more twist to it
now what this gives, is... it gives a
bundled look to your wires...
without actually having to
model a bundle of wires
however there are some advantages to doing this using deformers (instead)
and in general, using different methods.
And maybe we'll take a look at those
in a future video... [We will indeed. I've already recorded it]
but for now with this tip you can actually create bundles of wires twisted
quite easily quite simply as you just saw me do.
So the SweepNURBS is a pretty cool object, and if you guys have any other tips, I would
love to know about them.
and uh... until next time
see you later!