[Max] How to animate this DNA strand ??

Digipyro

Hey guys, I'm currently working on a game in which I've been asked to animate this DNA strand as if it were unfolding. Since my background in animating only consists of (simple) animations of characters I wasn't entirely sure how to approach it. First I tried dummy boxes thinking it was a good idea to let them follow the helix path ( path constraint) and animate that. This went horribly wrong.
After this I tried the twist modifier which let me have some control and gave me a basic animation ALMOST to what I wanted. However the straight / unfolded parts still rotate around when the next part is being unfolded . To solve this I tried making keyframes rotating the whole object the opposite way but this simply did not work ( nothing happened after placing the keyframes )

My question to you guys is: What would be the best way to approach this ? So the idea ( as can be seen on the image) would be for the DNA strand to unfold itself until it looks somewhat like a ladder. If people could point me in the right direction that'd be a big help I'm using max for this project but can use maya too.

ngw

I'm not sure I understand the issue you were having with the twist modifier... were you starting with the unfolded version & trying to bend it into a helix, or the other way around? Starting with it unfolded will be cleaner.

monster

I don't think you can use the twist modifier for the game engine. Unless you are exporting a Morph Target per frame.

This is just a bunch of dummies linked top to bottom.

Digipyro

ngw wrote: »

I'm not sure I understand the issue you were having with the twist modifier... were you starting with the unfolded version & trying to bend it into a helix, or the other way around? Starting with it unfolded will be cleaner.

Could you please tell me how you rigged this since whenever I apply a skin modifier things seem to go a bit odd ( when animating )