Hi there,
Modeling a flexible spiral cord is a common 3D modeling task.This rather beginner’s level video tutorial presents you one of the several ways available for modeling and rigging this flexible 3D form.
Here is the link to this tutorial :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLONnEcaHgQ&list=PLW-Y5Y-6rFAoNAgVi9-Zavmk66ghPTUyb
Thanks for watching
Wire string, is a type of cable which includes several lengths of steel wire set into a helix. The term cable is often used interchangeably with wire string. However, in common, wire string represents diameters larger than 3/8 inches. Dimensions more compact than this are specific as cable or cables. Originally wrought metal cables were used, but today steel is the main content used for wire rules.
Appreciate the tutorial. Preliminary render. (I’m sure I messed up somewhere along the line.
)
Now for materials!
Thank you for the so useful definition of the terms
Awesome result,if I may say…Thank you for sharing it!Also, thank you for the kind words, Peter
Thanks! What would you suggest in terms of materials? I never found many reference images for this sort of thing.
Hi and thank you for commenting.Talking about materials, that depends of course on the render engine you decided to use :so, if you go for a Blender internal rendering I’d suggest using a simple white diffuse color material, change the specular shader from CookTorr to Wardlso, crank up the specular intensity a bit and give it a fairly low “slope” value.Depending upon your preferences, you could also try adding a color ramp ( let’s say a white-to-blue gradient) to this specular shader, change the blend mode to something like “overlay” or “multiply” and set the “input” mode to something like “normal”.The same goes for the diffuse shader where a subtle color ramp would add some “richness” or “depth” to the final result…Additionally, you might wanted to enable the “mirror” option, set the "reflectivity " slider to a fairly low value and play around with the “Fresnel” slider, as well (alternately, for some quicker renderings, you could deactivate mirroring and apply,instead, an image texture mapped to the “reflections” and mixed with the diffuse color using either “overlay” or “mix” ( set fairly low) blending mode)
.Finally, for some additional realism, you might wanted to unwrap the spiral cable,export the UV layout as .png, go to GIMP and , by using a “crackles”-like brush, paint over the UV_layout some sharp edged lines here and there.You could use this texture in Blender for controlling,at the same time,the specularity and/or the reflectivity,the normals (displacement) and the color ( blend mode : multiply) of your cable’s surface.
Now,if you used Cycles render instead, a mix shader consisted of a simple diffuse and a simple glossy shader ( set the roughness of the glossy shader to 0 ) properly mixed using let’s say, a mix factor of 0.3 for the glossy component should do the job.Of course, you could use ,here as well, the aforementioned “specularity’s/color’s/displacement’s intensity mapping” texture by first adding the image texture,then (for the color) adding a “color mix” node, setting its blend mode to “multiply”, the upper color chip’s color to white and connecting the texture’s “color” output to the bottom input socket,then (for the specularity) adding a “math” node, set its operation to “multiply”, give to its upper slider the original mix factor value ( let’s say 0.3) and plug into the lower slide the “color” output of the aforementioned “specularity controlling” image texture,then, output this “math” node to the “mix factor” socket for the mix shader, finally, (for the displacement) connecting the texture’s “color” output to the “discplacement” input socket of the composite material.
It all depends on the amount of realism ( and detail) you want to achieve, this is just a suggestion.
Once again, thank you for watching,commenting and sharing your work.Peter
Wow! This is quite a bit of info. I’m going to give some of these suggestions a go. I will update with the finished render.
