BRCM 3D cable has many visualization issues:
Weird crossings, overlaps, at divided raceway.
Unusual bends at virtual connections
Twisted together untidily at Bends
Very small bend, or sometimes very large bend.
These issues causes weird visualization of cable and may result some inaccuracy in 3D cable length.
The BRCM conduit graphics looks similar to cable.
The idea is to use the same logic as we have for conduit generation to generate 3D cable.
The conduit has some rules to be routed straight and follow the provided bend radius and angle.
We can manipulate conduit as:
Set conduit thickness to zero
Diameter can be set
Bend angle can be according to raceway path
bend radius can be considering minimum value of cable bend and the cable routing logic.
Alexander has created a conduit catalog 'Flexible pipe' That can be also a good example
I think it is worth a try to generate the conduits to visualize the cable.
I discussed this idea with development, but the conclusion is that this would not be very helpful to the real issues. There are 5 steps to generating 3D cables in the logic of the code:
Generate topology for raceways and cable route.
Calculate cable laying order (very complex).
Consider offset of cable in each raceway segment to ensure the cables are straight.
Consider cable bend radius for each line string.
Create the 3D cables along the line string.
This idea would only affect item 5 which is actually the simplest step where we don't actually have a problem today. For this reason we will not implement this idea.