Creating Cables

Blender Plugins used in this Tutorial:

Cablerator

UV Toolkit -or- UV Squares

Introduction

So you want to learn how to make cables for your handheld microphones or interior equipment? Adding cables can add an extra step of realism to your builds and will look excellent, let me show you how!

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Getting Started

For this tutorial, I will be using the plugin Cablerator, it is $14 USD on Superhive, install tutorial. After you have installed the plugin, head to Add>Cablerator>Create Cable. To create a cable, click on the first location where you want the cable to start, then again where you want it to end. It will create a cable, if it is too thick, press S to scale the size. You can also press D to adjust the tension of the cable, and G to add more points for adjustment.

You can change the points in edit mode, select the mesh and press tab to switch to edit mode, each point you added with the G key will be movable and rotatable to move your cable to the best location. For cables that might get bigger, for example a mic cord with a coil spring, you can duplicate the cable with Shift+D and edit the cable Shift+ALT+C>Edit Cable and use S to scale the thickness up. After you are good with the position and location, select the cable and right-click Convert to>Mesh to make it an editable mesh. Then in edit mode you can line it up better or UV map it.

UV Mapping Your Cable

UVToolkit (Free - Recommended)

When I first made this tutorial, I used UV Squares. I have later found UVToolkit and love it so much more, not only is it free, but I think it does a better job then UV Squares did. You can still find the tutorial for UV Squares below.

Now to UV map your wire enter the UV Editing tab, first you will need to mark a seam in edge mode. Enter edge mode and hold ALT and click on one of the edges, you should see it select every edge all the way down your wire. Do the same on each cap of the wire, right click and "Mark Seam". The edges you selected should not be red, press A to select all, press U and select "Unwrap Angle Based". In the UV window, zoom in and select just the caps, we want to move these out of the way. I personally move them to the center of my wire normal map, and scale them down. Then select the rest of the UV mapping, and in UVToolkit select "Straighten UVs". You can find the UVToolkit menu on the right-hand side of the UV Window.

After the UV map has been adjusted, scale it up, a lot. We want the UV map to be very big, so the size of the wires match your smaller wires. Once the coil matches the width of your smaller wire, you can now work on making sure the seam is invisible. To do this we will rotate the UV mapping, move your camera to a point where you can see the seam, and slightly adjust the rotation until the seam is gone.

UV Squares (Paid)

Now let's get your cable on a texture, in this case we will give it a normal map to look like it's coiled! Head to the UV mapper and we will use the plugin UV Squares to adjust the mapping for easier layouts. Press A and mouse to Select All and you should see the default UV mapping show up in your UV mapper, move your mouse to the UV Mapper and Press A to select all. Open up the UV Squares context menu in the top right of the UV editor and select To Square Grid to make this a little cleaner. We want to scale the texture up over your normal map, the biggest thing to remember with repeating textures is the scale determines if they seamlessly line up, so if you are seeing a seam to adjust the scale! Also, don't forget to UV map the ends of your cables to not have normal maps messing with the texture.

Yes, I know this is the wrong cable, I forgot to take photos when I did the larger one...