Anybody have an idea of how I can smoothly animate a torus shape starting from a circle to a full ring?  Kind of like the circle drawing a ring as it extrudes?  Right now I am animating the circle shape in the spline modeler, extruding it over a 1 second time frame while at the same time applying a bend modifier to the object over the same 1 second time frame.  It's close, but I can see it bending a bit as it goes along instead of a smooth arc.  Also, with the bend modify I can only do a half ring.  Any better ideas to achieve this?  Thanks!

Chucker