How to animate gradually revelation of section for some object in Blender 2.5x?

Hi folks,

I’m tasked to do some animations of how virus HIV reproducing itself in cell.

I need to do sections from both virus and cell to demonstrate what’s inside (to show structure and compounds of them) and then show repdoruction alone.

However I don’t know what would be the best way to create these sections and how to animate them (preferably in gradually revelation of them).
In fact… I have only one (and lame) solution for now - hard model sectioned objects and crude replace them when there will be talk about ‘interiors’, but it’s definitely not what I want achieve.

Here are some fast googled examples:
http://www.lpch.org/media/images/conditions/ei_0090.gif
http://www.molecularexpressions.com/cells/nucleus/images/nucleusfigure1.jpg
http://www.ureacycle.com/images/cell.gif
http://www.nanotechblog.org/images/plant-cell-anatomy_9.jpg

Please, as I’m scrathing my head around… and obviously at yesterday it was already late… I’m begging for help.

Every info and suggestions to get me on the track would be appreciated. :yes:

Thanks in advance.

Well my first try would be a boolean modifier aplied to you cell, target a cube in difference mode… and then animate the cube. Then some texture work. That would work fine in other software, in blender you may have some stability problems… save often. Very simple example here.

thanks… it seems I’ll combine it with volumetric material, cause I don’t know how to assign different material to section faces… any idea pls?