Create a cylinder surface with the base at zero and the height at 1. You'll want to freeze transforms to get this right.
Deform the cylinder to curve uising Animate>Deform>Deform> By Curve. Create a cluster at the end of the deformed cylinder Constrain the connector to the cluster using Object to Cluster and use the normal constraing in Obj2Cls to align the connector to the end of the cable. You can use the curve deform scale to extrude along the curve, but for best results the source mesh or surface needs to be one unit in length in Y. Therefore scaling the curve deform to two will make it two units long along the curve, etc. -- Joey Ponthieux LaRC Information Technology Enhanced Services (LITES) Mymic Technical Services NASA Langley Research Center __________________________________________________ Opinions stated here-in are strictly those of the author and do not represent the opinions of NASA or any other party. From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Paul Griswold Sent: Monday, April 22, 2013 1:30 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Did I over-complicate this? I wanted to ask for your collective wisdom on this. I have a project where I'm animating around 30 different cables. Some are USB, some Firewire, and so on. Initially for the storyboards I use PowerExtrude to lay out all the designs, but now I need to fly the cables down my curves. If I didn't need the connectors, I could just animate PowerExtrude and be done with it, but all the various connectors need to be there as they extrude. My thought was, constrain a null to the curve, animate the null down the curve and use that to drive PowerExtrude. I then parent the connector to the null. I can't just build the cables beforehand and then deform them with a curve (AFAIK) because they need to appear to be growing from the client's product and the connectors can't be deformed by the curve in any way - just the cables can bend. So does my method seem ok, or is that overly complicated for what I'm doing? Sometimes I can't see the forest for the trees. -Paul
