Animating shape going along spline

[chris-x//]

Hello,

does any of you know a simple method for animating a shape growing along a spline.

In my coming project , I have a central point from which several 'pipelines' should grow. Optimum solution would be a slider which lets me indicate the % of growing I want.

Nothing random, the splines are defined, I just want them to be shaped a a rectangular ribbon at the end of the animation... But nothing is there at the beginning of it.

Seems simple but I cannot find any solution for that... Couldn't do it with the loft, well didn't managed as it seemed to be a solution I read after my googling session..

For those familiar with after effect, it's typically recreating a trapcode 3d stroke effect...

I could animated the vertexes of the spline, but if often changes direction and that would be too much time consuming... I guess some solution may exist...

Any help would be much appreciated,

Thank you very much,
cheers,
chris

[joconnell]

Looks like path deform you're after - draw the paths that you want the shapes to travel along in their final place, make a cylinder (as an example) and apply a path deform (world space) modifier to it. Pick one of the paths and hit move to path - it'll snap your cylinder to the path. Now play with the height of your cylinder, amount of height segments it has, then the percentage and stretch values in the path deform modifier and you'll get something similar to what you're talking about.

[chris-x//]

Thanks, working like a charm, the only problem is that my shape (box) is creating faces overlaps when at an angle (90°). But I guess there isn't any solution for that.
Well I will try not to use 90° angles Thank you for your kind help.

[glyph]

animating a loft is meant to work though I've never had much luck with it and yes path deform is great

but you can also do loft animation by animating the *scale* in the loft deform section which might fix your corners better - another benefit is any texture map is then automatically uvw correct