Thanks...
It appears that booleans do not animate in carrara
@ Varsel - that looks cool, but you went over my pea-brain head with this alpha channel business...
What someone else did that worked was to animate using a spline cylinder, changing the points at each keyframe. His sample is here:
http://homepage.mac.com/uvavoo/Doc2.mov It looked great, but I can't get it to work. I can animate the spline cylinder fine by modifying the length in spline modeler, but modifying points is something I can't make work...
Here's a sequence of what I did... the carrara file is zipped if that helps.
I appreciate your good advice... I will try to learn more about the animation stuff - I hardly ever do it. I may end up doing this with flash - but the Carrara would be better. I'm using 6.03.
again... thank you!