Waldo,

1. It will next time Carrara asks it to rebuild its mesh or you can use the Refresh button to force it.

2. You can control the twist using the Tip Twist shader, but the rest of the orientation is control by the direction of the strand. It will place the object's origin at the tip of the strand oriented along the strands direction.

3. Not sure what you're saying here. Can you elaborate?

4. Again you can use tip twist, but the rest of the rotation is determined by the strands direction.

You can animate your original object as a tip. Use the Animate slider on Anything Grows' UI to tell AGro when it needs to refresh. The easiest thing to do is just set it 100% at the end of your animation and it will refresh each frame.

Is this what you were trying to do with the image above?

Here is the Vertex object I'm using for a tip. I created a 512 polyhedron, chopped off the top, and then moved the bottom up so that it was above the origin to keep the tip of the strands from poking through the bottom.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins