How to "grow" a cylinder along a spline or path

[Former Member]

Hello,

I'm a fairly inexperienced use of VE and I am in process of making a wiring installation document that shows step by step procedures. What I would like to do is animate a wire being hooked up in one terminal and making it "grow" or lengthen and show it feeding into another terminal. I typically use 3DS MAX at work and can easily do this with that program but can't figure out if VE is capable of this.

After giving this some more thought, animating the transparency along the length of the object would work as well.

Thoughts?

Thanks for your help,

Dean F

[Former Member]

Hi Dean,

As my previous answer you can use the modifier under the windows top menu Create>Modifier and to add the correct one in the scene.

In this case may be you can resolve with the scale command using the scaling of the axis along the path if this it's a line.

You can animate also the transparency: try to record the animation with 1st frame with 100% opacity and the last frame 0% of opacity, just to understand the command (you will see the animated trasparency), then you can manage the opacity and the transitions.

Regards,

Salvatore

[Former Member]

I am using sap ve 7.0.I tried with scale option but still the clarity is less compared to modifier animation. But if i am animating using modifier, in the output 3d pdf it wont work . Then by using modifier also i am not getting the correct destination point.

[Former Member]

The scale command works fine also with 3D pdf, the modifiers don't work in 3D pdf (3D pdf engine limitation),

It's difficult for me to help without seeing anything.

CIao

Salvatore

[Former Member]

Exactly i am also trying to do this. If you got the answer then please convey to me also.