I need help bending a cylinder to make this....
 

alright guys i'm sorry that you have to goto another website to view what i am trying to model... but the website is...

www.firenock.com

on the first page you will see some gifs of a lighted archery nock..i am on the pro-staff of this company and he has asked me to try to model it in 3-d... i have everything down but the wire that attaches the battery to the back...it's a series of complex bends that circles the battery and for the life of me i cannot figure out how to bend it like it should be...i've tried messing with non-linear deformers but man was that a pain....any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated....

using the CV or EP curve tool, create the shape, then create a nurbs circle, and perform an extrude.

Yeah, what NeoStrider said.

ok, i'm a noob i know it..but i understand the whole concept of what you are saying...but it seems like it would be extremely difficult to make that first curve take the shape that i want....and the hardest part will be gettin the curve made in thefirst place due to the 3d view and i have trouble finding where my cursor is at on the grid....

start off in an orthographic view (front, side, or top) and draw the basic shape, making sure to add plenty of CVs. then in the other two orthographic views, pull the CVs out to where they need to be, checking the perspective view to see if the curve is taking the shape of the item you're trying to model.

i would just do a poly cv curve and then make the shape and then use the cylinder and snap to the end of curve and then just make the count high and it will take shape of the line you created ....then i would scale it down to size you need ....

a poly CV curve? never heard of it... unless it's something that's been added to maya after version 7.1... cause as stupid as it may sound, i still refuse to upgrade past that.

i dont know about a poly cv curve, maybe mmoore5553 means extruding polys along a curve and boosting the divisions in the history? (cuz i actually prefer to do it that way)

yeah sorry about the confusion ..yes that is what i meant ..wrote that when i was waking up this morning lol