How do I create a pipe growing?

[mosTHAted]

I want to have a pipe "grow"/ lengthen and turn corners inside a house in real time. Showing the path a pipe takes throughout the house. I know we can use the Layer Trail script but that only seems to work for lines not a drawing, unless I'm wrong. Can someone help me?

[jahnocli]

There must be a dozen ways of doing this. I would use the old "rub it out, then shoot in reverse" trick, where you start with the completed pipe, then progressively erase it, finally showing the frames reversed.

[slowtiger]

Draw the complete pipe (maybe on several layers if it covers itself in perspective). Put it into a group layer, create a mask layer. Animate just the mask with point animation to reveal more and more parts of the pipe. Maybe add a layer of the pipe's opening on top when it's visible.

[DK]

If you want to add an end to the pipe as it grows use this enhanced masking technique.

http://www.polliefillers.com.au/forum/RIBBON.anme

This is a technique Genete helped me with on a TVC i made a few months ago where I wanted to create a growing ribbon effect.

Only drawback is you cannot see the final result on AS display. You have to render a frame to preview. Drag the timeline along to a few diferent frames and render.

Study the masking layer settings to see how it works. It's an AS 5.6 file but should open in later versions.

Note: I believe there are improved masking settngs in AS 7 that may add that extra line end for you.

Cheers
D.K

[Víctor Paredes]

I can think in two options

- You can make a line and animate it with Curve exposure (similar to layer trail, but much simpler), then use that curve as a mask for your pipe.
- You can make the pipe with many points, make the path you want in another layer and use Follow Path tool to make the pipe travel around the path. If the action occurs out of the camera view, there will be no problem. If this is inside, you can use a mask to hide the part of the pipe you don't want to show yet.

I did an example of both, you can check the anme here
http://www.mediafire.com/?4rtgqe1bwyeyg7x

[crsP]

I want to have a pipe "grow"/ lengthen and turn corners inside a house in real time.

That's what she said...

If you know how to do it with lines, why not make a brush and apply it to the line? A pipe should be a fairly simple object which repeats, so maybe that's a possibility.

[mosTHAted]

Wow. Thanks for all the great responses guys. I will try them all.
I have only been using AS for 2 weeks. I had a gig and needed to jump right into it. So, I had no idea what I was doing at first. This forum answered a lot of questions but this was one that I just could not find. Until now. Thanks a lot.