[zekaric]

A friend of mine was having similar grief when he was looking to do this. Anyway, I only have Carrara (v4) so this is what I would do.

Method 1: Fake it. Use a tube and tecture it so that it looks like a cord. What I mean is makeing the whole cord one long cylindrical tube and have the texture mimic the cord. This'll do if the cord is never up close.

Method 2: Start with a cylinder witha number of sections along the length. Make links to points around the cylinder diagonally so that what you end up with is a ribbon that spirals down the cylinder. You only really need one full rotation or a 1/4 rotation of the cord and then using symetry and all that duplicate and weld the pieces together. Anyway, with the ribbon you can duplicate and scale in the two of the 3 dimentions to get the inside edge of the cord. Then it's a matter of filling in the space between with faces.

Method 3: Start with a profile of the cord. Extrude it up. Rotate one end by 45 degrees or something. Shift the rotated points horizontally.

Now duplicate the piece, rotate, weld it to the end of the first piece and Repeat until you have the length of cord you as looking for.

Method 4: Make a profile, and a spiral polyline. Loft it. Although this doesn't always make what you really want.



The above will make a straight cord. To connect to existing models you have equal number of choices.

Method 1: all three one object (radio, microphone, cord). Pose the microphone radio and cord in the vertex modeller.

Method 2: Pose the cord in the vertex modeller to get the shape you are looking for. In the assembly room position and scale it to where you want it.

Method 3: Attach a bunch of bones to the straight cord and pose the cord that way. Accurate placement to the radio and mic is up to you though.


Personally I hate Method 3 mainly because I keep managing to really stuff myself with bones (Undo is not your friend... Or it never is for me.) However you need to either make a good number of bones in this case or play around with vertex weights to have the cord bend naturally. For the other cases you will need to manually rotate the points in the vertex modeller which can be just as time consuming.