I recently saw an animation where a long dragon wound its way up and around a
pole. I know that some animation packages allow you to generate a path and
then "impale" an object onto the path so that the geometry conforms to it over
time.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could achieve the same effect with
3DS?
The BonesPro routine from Digimation will let you do this, with the bonus of
letting you add small motion variations to make a very organic-looking
animation.