EASY max question about alpha...

keizza

I have a simple plane with an alpha'd caustic texture on it.  I want to do a test to animate the opacity on the material itself...ie:  fade in and out.  But whenever I turn the opacity to 0 in the material editor....nothing happens.  Does max have a quick way around this?

Eric Chadwick

Which renderer? Viewport or Scanline or Arnold or V-Ray or are you going out to a game engine? Each has specific methods.

Semi-universal rendering method is to animate the Output Amount in the Bitmap. You can also animate Visibility in Object Properties. 

keizza

Just in the max(2017) viewport.  I have a diffuse texture w/an alpha texture for transparency.  I then need to be able to take the entire visibilty of that object that has this material applied to it.  But I need to test it in the viewport.  And whenever I try to animate the visibility of the object in object properties.....it still doesn't work unless i take the alpha texture out of the material.

Thanks for your response....and I realize this sounds super old school.

Eric Chadwick

OK which viewport mode? Realistic responds differently from Standard (different shaders on the backend). I think you might be able to wire the Bitmap into a RGB Multiply node and animate that towards black. But alpha is a tricky beast, not much viewport shader support. 

If you really need it in the viewport, I'd consider using a Shader FX shader, and the DirectX viewport mode. Then you'll get full control.