Cable Curve Creation

After researching for quite a while, I found a gif that showed exactly what I needed to make. After looking into it it turned out it was a really great plugin for Cinema 4D that parametrically wraps curves around an object. You can add noise and variance and all sorts, meaning it's super fast and does exactly what I need it to.

The tool is called spline wrapper for Cinema 4D. Here's a video about it:

So I fired up Cinema 4D and played around with the plugin. I created a test of a foot and wrapped a number of curves around it, altering options to make it look more natural. Here's how that looked:

However, to do this all properly, the plugin needed a 'backbone' curve that ran through the centre of the object so it could tell which direction to wrap the curves. The object also needed a relatively good UV map to base it noise and scale variance on. Good topology helped as well.

My workflow ended up being; Separate parts of the body in Maya, eg, foot, mid leg, upper leg etc, then dynamesh and zremesh in ZBrush, then UV in Maya, then export to C4D.

After trying this out on a test pose, here's how it looked:

I decided not to go with this as the final pose/curve selection as the pose wasn't dynamic enough and I discovered I could make the curves more random in terms of scale, which would fit better to get that wild cable look.

The brilliant thing about the plugin was, I could choose how many curves I needed and how many times to wrap them around, so I could change this to fit different parts of the body.

It was a fair amount of work getting each of the body parts set up and wrapped, but it was worth it as the final result looked really good. I based the final pose on this silhouette from Google, which was really dynamic and so much more interesting than a regular pose:

Here's how the final curve setup looked, all that's left to do is fire up Houdini and build a solver to get these to grow dynamically. (I created the ponytail manually in Maya, which was quick enough and gave me more freedom to choose where the curves were placed.)

There is a fair amount of overlap on the curves, but I should be able to sort that out in Houdini. Let's hope, eh?

Anyway, cheers! See you next time...