If any of you have used the Nurbs modeling program Rhinoceros, they have a tool called Rail Revolve. I've been trying to figure out how to do this in Maya but i cant do it. Any help would be great?
If you dont know what Rail Revolve is, its basically taking a Profile Curve and revolving it around a Rail you specify.
extrude?
Birail
this is close to what you are talking about.
there are multiple rail/birail functions in maya that , in playing with them you could achive a similar result to the tool in rhino.
but there is another neet feature that a lot of people dont know about that can do somehting similar.
animated sweep in the animation section of maya.
simply select a curve and keyfram an animation than go to the end of the animation and select animated sweep. it will fill the animation in as a surface.
so you could animate a curve along another curve and animate that sweep and get a similar result.
play with it a while. its really fun. if you want more info on how to do it you can email me.