An internal sphere works too!

lol You finished it! This is a wonderful idea. Inner sphere lock is very strong!


Look here. It would not let go even if I added some extra rotations. The tube would stretch, even go inside the rigid winch, but lock is still holding. Absolute beauty!

Now we have a truly flexible cable that can be controlled from either end! 

That was a quick-and-dirty I did in CC3. Have to make a nicer one with both ends spherized in Blender. I think we could even hide the bulged faces using the mesh tools in CC3. I did try a non-bulged version, but it did not work well. The internal structure probably fowls that up, or it's just not enough contact. Maxing the friction of the cable and the sphere probably makes it even stronger.

Yes, so the weight map could be potentially all white.
I was thinking of hiding ends with opacity map, as someone pointed recently that the mesh faces hidden in CC3 do not remain hidden, when the item is saved.
I tried it on a piece of cloth and indeed hidden faces were reverted once the cloth is saved and put back on an avatar. Is that a bug?

The hidden faces not staying hidden would be a bug.

So I'm thinking a skeleton within the cable might be a good addition as well. That way it can be posed into a position, the ball locks added, and then physics run. Both locks can be kinematic for animation.

And here is a start.

Turns out all you need to do is put a cube inside the cable tube, and then give an offset of about 2 for the cloth physics. It locks itself in. The cube also locks the cable so you can pose the ends in different directions. I did close the ends of the tube, so it cannot slip out. A skeleton for initially posing the cable would make sense. Right now you can translate/rotate the two cubes to set new keys, as long as your first frame is at the original position.

Download the basic project and press play!
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1DOv3JvkzkNGhLK9iUgeyOcnu4joaegY6

The cube stopper is good too, bur I still prefer a sphere one you came up in the first place.
It seems to hold better...

I found the 4u2ges is good but, for me, it snapped out when the layout was not ideal. In my case, there is gravity at work (because it is hanging down) and the angle of the item it is attached to changes which requires corresponding compensation on the lock...so I could not get it to work properly.
I am currently experimenting with a needle style tube (i.e. a tube with a loop at the end). It can also be finicky if the correct physics settings are not used but so far it seems to be working for me. The "needle" tube is soft cloth and the "thread" that holds it is a V shape made from two boxes. A square outline made of 4 boxes could be used in stead of the two box V in cases where the whole thing needs to turn up side down but for my case, the two box V is sufficient.
Then I use simple opacity on the soft cloth to hide the loop portion.
Obviously the Trebuchet is still nowhere near done and the rope can use a bit of positioning and tightening but below shows a proof of concept for the rope loop implementation...



"We often compare ourselves to the U.S. and often they come out the best, but they only have the right to bear arms while we have the right to bare breasts"
Bowser and Blue, Busting The Breast

That looks good Lord Ashes. I would not however disregard the ball hook Rampa came up with. It is strongest I've tested thus far and would not snap out easily, holding well when the rope is getting stretched while maintaining tension.