So I've been asked to make a little animation about how nerves grow from the nervous system to the heart in a young critter. The catch? I have to use someone else's 2D illustrations. So I'm like the South Park guys, using big bad powerful Maya to basically manipulate little cutout figures. :p

I don't have the illustrations from the other person yet, so I downloaded some crummy clipart from the web and sort of pieced it together so I could start trying to figure out how I'm going to do this.

Here's what I have so far, using the crappy web clipart:

https://eduvis.com/nerveblast2.mov

Thing is, it looks lame. It'll look better with real, matching illustrations, but I'm thinking there has to be something more I can do on my end to make it look cool. Do any of you have any suggestions, or places I could look for reference? There has to be neat ways to play with 2d shapes in 3d, I'm just totally having a brain fart today.