[Divideby0]

I'm modeling a knit of interwoven cables. I made opposing curves using sine/cosine in Plot2D tool and have arranged them to have an "over/under" look with a clearance of 10cm. I have two options to give the cables thickness of about 5cm each:

1) Rail sweep a 5cm diameter polygon along the length of the splines. This works, but I have about 12km worth of cables and the object size increases to about 22MB. Not very manageable. I suppose I could use the splines(only 3MB) as a stand-in in Layout.

2) Give the splines themselves a thickness through a surface style.The only thickness I can seem to find is in "pixels". can I assign a measurable thickness? Would Sas-lite "strand" feature work for this?

Is there another option?

[Divideby0]

Here is an actual sample of what im doing. the tube is about 1m diam. and 100m long. I will eventually make it abouut 500m long and stretch the ends out to about 30m at each end to be anchored to towing/towed vessles. The mesh will look like a giant finger trap. I'm thinking Sas will take a LONG time to render this.

Anyone know of a better way to do this?

[Mark]

I take it that you require to have this level of detail in actual geometry? I'd be tempted to do this as a heavily subdivided cylinder with texture maps. Probably render a damn sight quicker too...

[Divideby0]

I tried using some sort of primitive to render its wires. But I coulndt seem to achieve that over-under weaving and rounded cable look.

I may just have to work around with having a separate stand-in object while setting up the scene.