lose electrical wires?

[toorima]

Hello, I wasn't sure what to put for the title lol but I hope someone can help.
I have almost finished a model of a robot, of sorts. I am planning on making a scene where it will have some "battle damage" I have thought of an easy way to do this for the most part but what I am stuck on is a live wire effect. If it helps i'm going to try and describe it. head section is taking a hit and there is a piece missing, I'm going to have some sparks coming out of it, but I also want to show some of the electrical work as well, so I guess it will have to look like umm snakes? that are moving around while sparks are shooting about... If anyone has another idea for this that would be great. ^^

[SuperNova32]

i had a similar project and what i did was rail extrude a bunch of 'wires' of sorts and applied bones to them with ik and hand animated them. but just to get the right effect i also textured the back, behind the wires, with an electronic texture. hope this gives you some ideas :)

[toorima]

hm, that was sorta my idea for this... but I wanted to avoid bones if possible :p already using alot of bones lol

[m0184you]

^ Use the endomorph's. :p

[Cageman]

Depending on how much control you need, 2-point polys with clotfx and some wind effectors may create the chaos you are after. :)

[Silkrooster]

Check out Williams tutorial on 2 point polys and electrical arcs. I don't recall the name of the tutorial, but should still be available.
Even though he used the method for arcing, this method could be used for making wires jumping.
The idea is to use a procedural as a displacement map.
Silk