animated loft extrusion?! urgent help needed!!!

[samoth]

for days and days I've been serching for a way to animate a loft extrusion. The desired effect is best explained by the wellknown Windows screensaver "3D pipes" (...sorry, I'm not certain about the English title; it's the one that shows pipes that move like growing worms in three dimensional space...

So: is it in ANY way possible in MAX 4.2 to do the following:

Extruding a square over time along a path that is made from the outline of a "hollow" capital letter "C"?!!!

In other words: The aim is to create a three dimensional outline of the letter "C", beginning from nothing to the "closed" outline-loft.

Does anybody know a hint? You would be God! ;-))

Thanks an enjoy your Sunday.
samoth

 

[KBBJ]

Perhaps I would do like:

Start animating your path, so it wil grow from a length on zero at the begining, to its full length at the end of the animation.
Afterwards, make an extrusion of your shape by using ”Loft”.

Explanation on lofting:

- Select your shape
- Press the button “Loft” (You’ll find it under ”Compound Objects”.)
- Under the submenu “Creation Method”, select “Move”.
- Press the button “Get Path”
- Select your path

That must be it.

From KBBJ (-:

 

[samoth]

...sounds quite easy, but: how would you animate a path that is curved? A circle for instance? I think that's difficult... I found a solution though: animating the scale parameters of the loft object does a quite perfect job.

thanks for your replay anayway ;-)