Guild of Writers

Okay, figured out Texture Animations.

It's not too much different from how we were doing it in Blender actually.

Once you get your material assigned to your object, and your texture UV mapped correctly, go down to where you set your keys for Object Animations and click on the button that says Key Filters. In the box that pops up, uncheck all but Materials.

Then, with your object selected, call up your Material Editor. Select the material you assigned the object. Click on the plasma layer you want to animate.
Scroll the box down until you get to the Coordinates box. Look at where it says Offset for "U" and "V" (in Blender we had "X", "Y" and "Z"). "U" is like the X coordinate in Blender, and "V" is like the Y coordinate in Blender.

Now go down and click on "Set Key", and then click on the Key box to set your first Key for the material, with the offs set to 0.0. Then move your animation timeline to where you want to set your next key. Then adjust either one of your U or V Offs to where you want them, and then click on the key button again.

The really cool thing about Max is you can move your Time Line bar back and forth and SEE the texture animate while still in Max! I'll give Max an A+ for that one!

I'll write up a tutorial for this, this afternoon, right now I have to go extract the boys from school.

Just to add to that: you can also animate object transparency, ambient color and other parameters of the texture in the same way.

What really bugs me though is that Max makes objects completely invisible in the viewport as soon as you set the texture opacity to anything else than 100%.

You can also alway's use a alpha channel on the texture to get transparacy , for example if you want to make a part of the texture invisable ...
You can use it by using a .tga ( tagra ) file with a 5th channel which is the alpha blend ...

Just a added comment on animating textures. Just like regular animations you can set names and loop names for layer animations. This is done just like how the plugin documentation covers animated objects with named animations. However rather than setting the note track to the object, you set it to the material you wish to animate.

Also, because of the way animation in set up in max. Unlike with blender you can't just animate the color. Setting an animation to a material will set ALL of the material's attributes to animate. The unwated animations can be deleted within the dope sheet for the material. So if you're setting note tracks for your materials you can delete the unwanted animated properties as well. Otherwise all the material's attributes will be animated upon export.

I posted a tutorial on how to do a simple texture animation (water ripples). Very easy and didn't require any plasma components for that one.

I realized as I was writing it up, that really, you could make a whole book on animated textures and layers, heh. LOTS of info there!

Today I made a animated texture that responds on a clickable ...
It works about the same as a normal animation , the only thing you have to do now it add a Note track to the TEXTURE and not to the object.
Als you need to add a mtlanimation component to the object to select wich material is animated
After that in the responder just add a materianl -> play script , or anything else that you want ....
And thats about it