Finally!!! God I thought it would never work

So what I first did was make a sketch pattern of rectangles to slip on the cylinder:

I did the math so that it would fit perfectly on a cylinder 20 mm long with a diameter of 3 mm (and no i'm not going to do it again to show you, too lazy).
I then wrapped it around my cylinder (obviously) and extruded the sketch inwards (intruded?) to create little indents to break up the geometry a little bit.

After that was all done I filleted all of the horizontal lines in the cylinder. Now i cant stress this enough, I filleted EVERY SINGLE HORIZONTAL EDGE. There's over 350 of them and it took about 30 minutes of pressing the fillet button, selecting a bunch of edges, telling Solidworks to fillet them, waiting for it to load the new form. Then repeating.

But it was so worth it. Look at this.

Now tell me that doesn't look like something you'd expect to see on a futuristic prosthetic-cyber-arm, or a similar thingy (don't actually tell me that by the way, it will make me very upset. I spent an irresponsibly large amount of time on this one piece of my form).

You know what the best part about this object is though? It behaves itself in 3DS Max :)

Stay tuned...