Approaches to the Animated Vine Text from Curves

The animated vine text is created by attaching an FX brush stroke to a curve in Maya.
Each stroke had to be adjusted to grow, and fill individually for each letter, but I am duplicating the letters with only minor alterations to each incidence, so the process gets faster as I build the alphabet.

I started using the node editor to duplicate the strokes onto the new letters. I named the strokes and curves for each letter by placement and function. 

Most stems, arms, and typographic structures share a number quantized by strokes, but there are a few exceptions (see the image below). (e.g. the highlighted is LowRCurveOut1; Low= lower case, R = letter "R", Curve = as opposed to stoke, Out = left shape boarder for the most part each stroke of a letter stroke also has an In, a fill, and some have a foot), 1 the typographic components are numbered from left to right (the letter "r" has 2 strokes "m" has 3).

I made exceptions to my organizational structure for aesthetic reasons. The pages with the vine text are describing the goose in his natural environment so I wanted the growth of the foliage to have fluidity; the highlighted curves from letters "g" and "w" would have been made with 2 quill strokes, but the Roman alphabet I am using (a mix of Champ Fleury developed in 1529 by Geofroy Tory (Tory web) and Romain du Roi by Louis Simonneau (Simonneau, web)

I have all the letters animated for the first page "Once upon a time there was probably a goose".

I started running into problems rendering with mental ray a couple days ago.

I thought I had done something wrong in the Node Editor, but mental Ray does not seem to be working with the version of Maya 2016 I am using. The above image is a simple torus and plane with 2 different shaders and multiple light sources.

The the letters are working with Mental Rayin 2014, but the file with all the letters together will not load (it is a Maya ASCII, so it should). 2016 has been very problematic, especially in the lab. I often find that the selection tools will suddenly stop working, and the text will be a different size when I transfer the files into 2015 or 2014.

Rendered with Maya Software's render engine

Works Cited

 Tory, Geoffroy. Champ Fleury. Paris - Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Coll. Div., 1529. print/web. The diagrams I used are photographs of the book pages 34 to 140, available online (pages 23 to 76) through rarebookroom.org  http://www.rarebookroom.org/Control/trychf/index.html

 Simonneau, Louis. Médailles sur les principaux événements du règne de Louis le Grand, the book is not in english, and I am still researching this source, unknown page, the diagram is from an image on the  web. more info https://archive.org/details/medaillessurlesp00acad