I wanted to ask for your collective wisdom on this. I have a project where I'm animating around 30 different cables. Some are USB, some Firewire, and so on. Initially for the storyboards I use PowerExtrude to lay out all the designs, but now I need to fly the cables down my curves.
If I didn't need the connectors, I could just animate PowerExtrude and be done with it, but all the various connectors need to be there as they extrude. My thought was, constrain a null to the curve, animate the null down the curve and use that to drive PowerExtrude. I then parent the connector to the null. I can't just build the cables beforehand and then deform them with a curve (AFAIK) because they need to appear to be growing from the client's product and the connectors can't be deformed by the curve in any way - just the cables can bend. So does my method seem ok, or is that overly complicated for what I'm doing? Sometimes I can't see the forest for the trees. -Paul
