Extruding Faces over time
 

Hi, I'm new to this forum and am _very_ new to mel scripting. I am trying to extrude faces on a curve, but also do it over a period of time. I am starting with a poly cone and extruding the top half on a curve with enough added faces to produce a smooth snake-like shape. I can do that with no problem, but what I want is the process, from the small cone to the fully extruded "snake" to be animated.

Blend shapes and skeletons would be difficult because this will be a very long, snakey growing object with lots of twists and turns etc. I can't use paint effects because there will be lots of closeups as well and the "snake" will be the focus of the animation as it winds and grows around another object.

I was wondering if it would be possible to add a time variable script to the extrude faces command. Any ideas?

I hope this makes sense! Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

I think you cannot use the actual extrude command for this. You could try to pull the effect off with the animated sweep feature. Look it up in the docs and you'll see what I mean...

Thanks! I didn't know about animated sweeps and I _do_ see what you mean. I'll give that a try.

Hi brosseau,

eh... I'm not sure how well this method could be used... also because it will only work if histrory doesn't get deleted... which might get a long history list for an object...

but you can e.g. keyframe the extrude and the other things regarding an object during the modelling process...

I have atttached an little example which is done by keyframeing the "tweaks" from the modelling history of a polygon cube... :)

regards

Strarup

That was really neat Strarup! Thanks for passing that along. I was wondering if there was a way to animate history, but I have also been looking specifically at animating the extrusion along a curve because I have so many growing in all different directions(vines growing up and engulfing a statue). But I found a tutorial on how to make a tentacle grow and I was able to modify it for my purposes. It was missing a couple of key steps and I couldn't get it to work for a while, but finally did and things are working fine now.

As far as what you did - did you right click on the tweak and then key it? It would definitely be a good thing to know.
Thanks!

Hi brosseau,

yup... I just clicked on an object in the history, then the attributes appear in the bottom, and then there I clicked on the attribute I wanted to keyframe, and rightclicked, and chose "key selected"... :)

I have found the file and attached it... :)

btw. maybe you can use these scripts, or get some ideas from them... :)
distributeOnCurve by Edvard Toth...
nthd_extrude by Cory Clarke...
zgExtrudeWin by zach grachan...

regards

Strarup