Wow, it's been a WHILE since I last posted a random animation test. Long story short: I no longer have access to any Maya software, so I've been learning Blender for the past couple of years.
The good news is it's going GREAT, and I've never been more inspired to make random 3D stuff! (Some of which even involves animation! Go figure!)
So yeah, this was just a quick rough test of an idea I had for how to recreate the frequently used "Lightsaber cuts through metal wall/door" effect from lots of Star Wars things. Actually pretty simple. I made a small blobby shape, put a molten texture on it, then animated it in an array around a circle with a low offset so they'd sort of meld into each other. If you look, you can see the blobs are still a bit more individually defined than I would like, but that's probably easily fixable with some small adjustments. This was just a quick proof-of-concept. For funsies.