Tutorial: how to model (and render) a realistic spiral cable in Blender (and Yafaray)/2

<< Tutorial: how to model (and render) a realistic spiral cable in Blender (and Yafaray)/1

In this second part of the tutorial I will show how I positioned the spiral cable, modeled as in the PART 1, in the scene to be rendered.

As an unskilled blender modeller as I am, my first attempt was to add a Curve modifier to drive the shape of the cable. Apart from the difficulty to model the curve in a realistic shape, the curve modifier deformed the wires in a very awful manner. So I thought it was time to learn something about rigging. 🙂

I added an armature and extruded 40 bones, one for each coil, and 2 longer bones for the tails.

Then I had to make it parent (armature type) of the cable. To do that I had to select the cable as first and the armature as second, then select the command Object/Parent/Make Parent…

On the first pop-up menu I choose armature type, on the second one I selected to automatically create vertex groups From Bone Heat.

Now I can position my cable into the scene and shape it by simply moving the bones (mostly the last one).

First of all, in Object Mode I moved the armature so that the first tail is in the socket placed in the body of the intercom. Then in Pose Mode I grabbed and moved the last bone so that the second tail fits the socket placed in the handset.

But it doesn’t look very realistic yet: the cable seems to fly above the floor. So the next step is to use the cloth tool to make it automatically lay onto the plane.

To do that, in the Object (F7) section I opened the Physics buttons tab and enabled Collision both for the cable and the table. Then I selected the cable and pressed the Cloth button. I set up the cloth material to have high stiffness and high dumping as in the images below.

Then I pressed the Bake button to generate the deformed cable; the default ending frame is 250, but after about 100 frames the shape is quite stable.

Tutorial: how to model (and render) a realistic spiral cable in Blender (and Yafaray)/3>>