Animating tracing lines Cristóbal Vila has made some amazing videos. I believe I read somewhere that he uses modo for this, but that is beyond the scope of my question. At the start of his "Ishafan" video he animates tracing a "circular", flat pattern and after that he traces the lines of a vault. I am curious about the following:


Is there a good, non-"do this a couple hundred times" way to do the 2D tracing?
Is there a way to (almost) automatically make the "moving fronts" light up more than the rest of the 2D tracing, like in the video?
Is there a good way to do the 3D tracing, without having to use a boolean modifier with a bunch of moving objects to gradually reveal the lines?


I hope these questions are not too generic, (like: how to model, light and animate a running medieval army or something)? Is using python maybe the best option? I would love to hear your opinions on this.
3) You might get along with curves and bevel. Not sure if you can get nice corners as in the video though.