Modelling Sensory Fibre Optic Strands

SketchUp Pro
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Hi everyone, first post here.

I need some help creating a model for work. The company I work for designs sensory rooms and I work the visualisations and designs for the spaces.

We offer a popular product that I’d like to find a more efficient way of modelling within SketchUp. I have a current workflow for it but it can be very problematic and can cause large amounts of lag with my machine.

This is the product I’m trying to model -

IMG-20190804-WA0010
IMG-20190804-WA00101200×1600 117 KB

The current workflow I’m using consists of drawing a bunch of curved lines, exploding them, and then using Clothworks to simulate them. Then I use the follow me tool to extrude the newly simulated lines and copy V-Ray sphere lights along them. As you can probably tell it can be very tedious and often causes SketchUp crashes when I generate too many strands.

I’m just wondering if anybody has any ideas for creating something like this a little more effectively or has had experience doing something like this before? I tend to have to make new versions of this model for different projects and it would be beneficial to me to speed up the process and nail down a consistent workflow.

I’m still fairly new to SketchUp with only about 2 years of experience, it’s certainly a lot different to software which I used to use like Cinema4D.

Much appreciated

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Have you looked into Profile Builder? you can create your shape/group and then extrude along a path or shape you draw.

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Instead of ‘Follow Me’ and ‘Copy along path’, try with c-points (guides)

or… you can also just try to use a material in which with the help of a texture you allow it to be brighter from place to place (instead of having a lot of v-ray light spheres). It is also possible to create those optical fibers as tubes, applying the material with lights on the inner cylinder, and the outer one to be semi-transparent and colored.

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Thank you Mihai, that seems to work much better for me :slight_smile:

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