Splines all the way.
Sweep along splines sounds good too. You could probably combine a few circle splines into one shape and sweep that.
Or you could paint the splines on a flat plane or around a cylinder, then twist and kink them, then pathdeform(WSM) them along another path spline to get the final wire bundle. Graphite Modeling tools in Max has the ability paint splines on a mesh surface. If you're on an older version of max there is a really good spline painter script in Soulburns scripts.
You could look into Soulburn's wire bundle script. Its part of Soulburns Scripts and he wrote it so they could do wire bundles like that when they where making Walle.
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Sweep along splines sounds good too. You could probably combine a few circle splines into one shape and sweep that.
Or you could paint the splines on a flat plane or around a cylinder, then twist and kink them, then pathdeform(WSM) them along another path spline to get the final wire bundle. Graphite Modeling tools in Max has the ability paint splines on a mesh surface. If you're on an older version of max there is a really good spline painter script in Soulburns scripts.
You could look into Soulburn's wire bundle script. Its part of Soulburns Scripts and he wrote it so they could do wire bundles like that when they where making Walle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvlj18mJnyI&feature=plcp&context=C441b953VDvjVQa1PpcFMZ-76zdrNbk2XoS0QXgWuKuDgDIjWMPfU%3D&noredirect=1
(I strongly recommend watching all of his tutorial ^^)