hello every one, i lately was trying to figure out how to create fiber optics wires and compose many shapes with them.
fiber optics are basically a glass wires which light can transfer inside them to transfer data
they look like this
now the question is if i want to create creative things like the example below
make a cylinder, with some segments for a nice curve, set the material (you can go with glass and a volume emitter, but you can also map it for better control)
(the cylinder should be oriented in the Y axis)
make the shape you want, add a hair particle system, model it as you wish.
Give the cylinder, a particle instance modifier. Pick the particle system, set ‘create_along_path’
well they do remind of hair ?, you might use hair particles, perhaps use gooseberry branch for it.
I do remind that there were version were one could set width of the hair.
It would be easy to do this on text and comb it a bit, but pointy hair endings might not be what you want.
Another way would be path and loft (a group of) circles (or object existng of multiple joined circles).
This would probaply work best since you could loft a solid circle. but might require more work if you want to do letters.
If you want the end points arranged in a specific way, like in the “speed” example above, I would start with those end points as vertices, then extrude all of them to the start point, scaling them down also. Then convert the mesh to a curve, change the curve type to bezier, , select all the handles at once, then move them to change the shape of the curve.
Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Particles and Physics Simulations” (coukd fit in other sections, too, but this seemed the most appropriate)
Thank you all for the reply, i felt the hair method is the best, so i had a go on it,
it worked, but not as good as i want it to be, i still feel that i don’t have total control over what im doing,
i think more practice is needed, i will look also into other methods
