Steel cable is easy

[R Reynolds]

As shown in the first image, I'm installing electric trolley wire down my city street set. The solid copper wire is strung from steel clamps that are supported by multi-strand steel cable.

 

I played with the concept of modeling the cable strand by strand but that turned into a lot of patches for low visibility set dressing. Instead I built some angled half cylinders to generate bump images using a black to white gradient material. So the cables shown in the second image (a view from above) are simple tubes that were straightened in an action and then cylindrically decaled. They turned out much more convincing than I expected. They probably wouldn't hold up if you were tracking an ant walking along the cable, but at this distance, I'm satisfied.

[largento]

Looks very convincing to me!

[robcat2075]

That looks great!

 

I did a slightly similar maneuver for the magic rope in my BUS STOP segment. Technically it should be possible to use patch images for this sort of thing but I found they didn't shade right.

[itsjustme]

Looks fantastic, Rodger!

[nino banano]

I like this render, very convincing , very well done...