Hello,
You know those springy things which climb down stairs, well how would you go about making one in 3d which would keep flipping along a flat area.
Is there an application which would allow this kind of modelling/animation?
Marg
You could try to make a mesh, in witch You alternate squares an triangles, each time increasing their position in the y-direction.
That should give You a springlike schape to work with.
If You recreate this each frame, with varied mutual y-distances, the shape should be able to bend in any direction You want.
It depends on how realistic You want the result to be.
Deforming the tri's of a cylinder is an other possibility, but would require a bit more maths. ;)
Id go with a deforming cylinder and a transparency mapped spiral to show the spring.
One word - many uses...
TOKAMAK
IPete2.
The new blended vertex weights are perfect for a task like this. As pointed out, create a cylinder and use masked transparency to make the spiral. Now give it a simple skeleton using blended weights when binding the vertices to the bones. With vertex weights set correctly this is trivial to animate.
As for specific apps, CharacterFX is a cheap animation tool which supports blended vertex weights. Other than that your options are big name tools like 3D Studio Max, Maya, or Lightwave.