Steel Cable

[Ryan.Irwin]

Wondering if anyone knows a good way to make Steel Cable.  Normally I would make a circle to the diameter of the cable then extrede the length.  I would then go into the apparance and create a new appearnce with the image .jpg of a cable ovelayed on it.  I used the same image on the Bump. But the rendered image makes it look like rod.

Do i need to create a sample 3"s of cable by building x amounts of strands then lofting them into a sprial.  Then Making a Pattern of said stands to create my full cable.  This seams rediculously time consuming.  So my question is... anyone know a quick way of making cable that when rendered still looks like a cable?

[jtylerbc]

If you're talking about something like wire rope, faking it with a texture might work well enough.  This method won't stand up to close-up views, but I've faked it before with a color style (would be an Appearance now).

I just started from a copy of the Threaded color style, then tweaked the scale and rotation angle.  After some trial and error, I came up with something close enough to look reasonable as a background object in a scene.  It won't look realistic enough to look good if the cable is the focus of the image, but if it's not (like showing wire rope lifting a load), it seems to work fairly well for me.

[Ryan.Irwin]

I have tried that, please look at attached image.  When I render it dosen't look right

[Ryan.Irwin]

I think I figured it out.  Attached is an Image is of 2' [609.6mm] sample of 1" [25.4mm] Stainless Steel Cable.

I made my 1" diameter which was d0.  so across I had 5 strands so the diameter of these are d0/5.  then constained all the stands to the oringinal diameter.  (so now i can change the overall diameter and all strands change accordinly).

I then had to extrude the sketch 0.001mm.  and made an offset of 12.7mm. copied the sketch onto this new plane.  Extruded again to 0.001mm.  Then lofted each stand to the one beside it.  saved this as an .ipt.   Opened a new assembly and patterned the .ipt 48 times at an offset of 12.7mm.

Looks a little rough where the pieces meet but overall looks better than a rod.

[jtylerbc]

That's not how mine comes out, but I'm not sure what would be different between yours and mine.  Even in Realistic visual style, mine looks more like your image on the right.

The only things I changed were the scale and angle on the texture image.  If you changed more than that, you may be causing yourself some undesired effects (too shiny, etc).  If you didn't, then I'm at a loss - I'm still getting used to this new Appearance system.  Hopefully someone with more experience with it will weigh in.

[jtylerbc]

That does look nice.  I may have to keep that method in mind for the future.

When I did my original "rope texture" method, it was in a very large assembly running on a rather insufficient computer, so that technique wouldn't have been an option.  Now that I'm working with better hardware, it might be a way to improve on what I was doing before if it ever becomes necessary.

Still not sure why the texture method turned out so strange for you, but glad you worked out an alternative.

[JDMather]

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@Ryan.Irwin wrote:

 Then lofted each stand to the one beside it.  saved this as an .ipt.   Opened a new assembly and patterned the .ipt 48 times at an offset of 12.7mm.

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This does not make logical sense to me.
Attach the assembly here.

[Ryan.Irwin]

I opted against doing this.  I found a better image to wrap and bump over a solid rod to look like cable

[JamesLovell]

what wrong with modeling the cable profile using coil? 'Length & Rotation'

[mcgyvr]

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@jameslovell4987 wrote:

what wrong with modeling the cable profile using coil? 'Length & Rotation'

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Nothing.. other than the increase in file size/complexity.

[JDMather]

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@jameslovell4987 wrote:

what wrong with modeling the cable profile using coil? 'Length & Rotation'

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Reading the description the OP used Loft rather than coil and notice that it was a component Assembly of the wirerope strands.

In general I would suspect by the time you added the rest of the assembly and backed out a bit so that you could see it all that you would not be able to tell the difference (visually) between a modeled wirerope and a good cosmetic texture.
But you would surely see the difference in file size and performance.

[gilbertomejiac]

is posible to make in inventor something like this tutorial?

http://datab.us/tSOtP-4g8Aw#SolidWorks tutorial: Modelling a rope/wire.

[JDMather]

Sweep with Twist.

[vladimir_michl]

Take a look at this tutorial for Inventor (in Czech):

http://www.inventorguru.cz/2016/01/modelovani-ocelovych-lan-v-inventoru.html

Vladimir Michl, www.cadstudio.cz  www.cadforum.cz