I just completed an interactive animation that involved animating an extruded tube. Strata CX has some great features but animated extrusions are not one of them, sorry to say. Any way one of the simple tricks I have learned using Strata is to do things with image maps that I couldn't do with geometry. Here is a tutorial on how I animated the extrusion of the pipes. I hope you like it.

Okay first off lets start a bezier pen line that looks something like this.

Next, select the filled oval tool and double click it to set the diameter of the inside hole.

After you have put in the flat circle with a hole in it you will need to extrude it along the path. Click and hold the circle while you drag the mouse to the path and they will both highlight with red boxes. Once highlighted let go of the mouse button.

Okay, now you should have a tube like this.

Once you have the tube made go ahead and make the texture you want to put on it. I chose a nice blue glossy one.

Now drop a camera in so you can see what is going on and position it how you want. Tip: Strata CX doesn't like to render correctly when rendering in the modeling view. Always render through a camera to get accurate renders.

Now turn on the global light and pick the white texture for the light.

Select the background tab and set the background to the white texture too.

Okay, now go to the ground tab and check the Ground Plane on.

In Photoshop I made a stencil map that I will lay over the top of the blue texture I made for the tube. I used black at the left side and white at the right. The white color will be seen but the black part will let the blue texture show through.

Next, load it into Strata CX and only have the stencil channel loaded with the texture. Tip: load the stencil channel first then unload the other channels. If you unload the other channels first the whole texture file is lost and you will need to re-load it.

Projection map with no tile and replace mix for the stencil texture.

Now use the position button on the texture tab to position the stencil map. I had to rotate mine.

Next you will need to make sure the stencil map is oversized compared to the model. Stretch it out all around

Now it should look something like this.

The fun part is animating the stencil map. All you do is pick a new point on the time line and drag the stencil map off the model.

Render it out into .jpg files so you can edit them in Photoshop later.

Here is how it will render out. You will need to edit out the white part of the pipe and the shadow it casts. After each frame is edited you can put them all together in your favorite video or multimedia app. If you want to play around with the type of stencil map you use you can probably be able to render this out without having to edit it in Photoshop. I was under a deadline and didn't have time to fiddle. Maybe you can do better!

See the final interactive animation at http://home.ghx.com >>>