[Closed] wire plugin

Looks like a neat plugin. Although you can do this trick pretty easily with current tools (not as easily as this plugin, but still pretty straight forward.)

1. Make a long cylinder with lots of segments going up.
2. Copy this cylinder a bunch of times so you have a circle shape of cylinders.
3. Apply the twist modifier. Give it a high twist value
4. Collapse into a single mesh
5. Use path deform to deform your mesh along your wire path. Voila.

• Neil

Another way would be a simple loft. Create the control spline, create a circular array of circle shapes that represent the wire bundle, attach the array together and boolean the circles so you have one solid shape, Loft and adjust the twist deformation. As always with Max there are atleast 10 different ways to do this one task, it is just a matter of how you wish to approach it.

-Eric

A Script would be cool if it added knots at intersections though wouldn’t it?

Hey, it’s cool to see people beeing interested in that.
Thank you for your suggestions! Maybe the loft thing could be fairly easy to do with maxscript… if time is on my side, I’ll give it a try!

Nope, at least as of max9, lofts are stil not creatable through maxscript.

• Neil

You can access the sweep modifier how ever and that should do what you are looking for.

I don’t think the sweep modifier allows for twisiting like lofting does.

-Eric

here’s an image made with the technique suggested by PiXeL_MoNKeY.
It’s not made with Maxscript but a good way to do that kind of stuff.
Maybe “extrude along spline” would also be an option for scripting that!

Here’s another suggestion, though it’s more for looser bundles.

Create a master spline, and use particles with path follow. This has options for particles to swirl and twist on themselves as they travel along the master spline.

You can then use their behaviour to create splines per particle (I use Ghosttrails, but I have seen scripts to create splines from particle motion as well)

• Steve