I am trying to create a flow of water by duplicating metaballs along a curve. I've gone through the motions of creating a curve and a metaball, setting the `Parent` of the metaball to the curve, set the `Duplication` to `Frames`, unchecking `Speed`, and animated the `End` frame. Looks good in the viewport (sometimes needing to click the `Update` buttons to get it to update).

However, when I go into Rendered view or actually rendering the thing, none of the metaballs show up, not even the starting metaball. Changing `Duplication` to `None` shows the whole thing in Rendered View, but when I do anything to update the metaballs I only get the starting metaball. I even played around with the metaball's resolutions to no effect.

Is there any other method to create this growing "sausage"? Remember the material is semi-transparent so using ordinary spheres will produce ugly overlaps.