This video clip (click the image to view) is the result of an experiment / challenge that I put myself up to recently. I’m sure everyone has seen the “growing vines” effect that’s been so popular in motion graphics work for a while now. I was playing with one of the new options in Maya’s polygon modeling tool set, and I thought it would be fun to try out that same effect in 3D. Because of the fact that Maya’s poly extrude operation doesn’t have keyable min and max value fields, I had to figure out a few work-arounds.

A step-by-step walkthrough of my roundabout process for growing poly vines in Maya follows below:

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