There is a tutorial here that explains how to make a growing vine effect in 3DStudio Max by animating extruded shapes.  In the tutorial he makes a path for the shape to extrude along as well as keyframe the extrusion over time.  He also applies a twist modifier to the object to make it more random.  I have tried to do the same thing in Carrara 6 Pro but without success.  I make the shapes to extrude in the spline editor and then keyframe the extrusion over time.  The problem is that I can't make the extrusion change direction and twist while it is "growing" or extruding.  If I apply all the deformations to the spine and extrude the object, it just looks like I am scaling it forward, not the "growing" look I want.  Does anyone know of a good way to do this in Carrara?

Thanks for any and all help,
Trevan

 Hi Trevan,

Are you using the pipeline method of extrusion? That will be the best method for something like t his. Also, under the cross section rotation options, there is the ability to twist the surface of the spline object as opposed to only rotating the  cross section. That will help also.

Mark

Thanks for the quick reply Mark.  I was using the Translation method so I switched to Pipeline.  What is the difference between the two?  Also, I can't seem to find the cross section rotation options anywhere.  I see some cross section options but they don't mention rotation.

Thanks,
Trevan

The Twist Surface is found when you select a cross section and then choose the Arrange => Rotate menu while in the Spline Modeling room.

Hot dog! That is what I was looking for, thanks Mark.

I am still not very experienced in the spline modeler so forgive me in case I ask something obvious.

I am interested in this topic too and I was able to create some animated spline objects, that
are close to a "growing vine". But the only method I found was to animate the points of the spline with moving the around to simulate the grow effect.

Is there another method in Carrara I haven't found yet to extrude the object along the spline which is more like the percentage based extrusion mentioned in the tutorial?

I actually could not duplicate the effect in the tutorial using the spine editor.  I eventually used a bunch of metaball particle emitters moving along a motion path to come close to recreating the effect.

Thank you for the answer :)
I will try that method and see if I can get a similar result.

There are a couple of ways to make this happen. Probably the easiest would be to create the full path and and then animate the cross section size over time. That way you know that that the path would be perfect and the shape would appear to grow because scaling the cross sections up from 0 would make appear as if they were growing.

Mark

Thanks again.

I've tried both ways and learned some more things about the possibilities inside Carrara.
There are many abilities within Carrara I don't know yet, but I am looking forward to learn
more about them.