Hi Guys,
I am planning on making a tool that will help me to make cables running along a certain rigging setup. The setup would be fairly simple:
a cable starts at a helper point, will run along several wheels/sheaves and will end up at another helper point. See the following image for a quick idea.
Now I know this can be tricky, and I’m not asking anyone to do this for me I’m just wondering what you guys think would be a best way to make this cable ‘live’. If one of the wheels would change position, I want the cable to update.
I already have some code that helps me to find the tangents on the circles, where the cables will naturally start curving around the circles. Also made a start with a custom attribute that can manually update the cable, but I’m just not sure how best to put this all in one tool that automates automatically.
I can think of a couple of ways:
- build a cable that is rigged using a skin system. This would be hard though, because the tangent touch points of the cable to the wheels will differ per wheel position.
- use a scripted controller that will update the cable when needed. disadvantage there is that I’m not a big fan of putting large scripts in a scripted controller.
- create a plugin? or a modifier plugin? what plugin type would be best suited and how do I force it to update when the wheels are moving in the scene?
any thoughts, ideas would be very welcome!