How do you make animated textures in 3dsmax?

SinisterUrge

I've been asked to complete an art test for a job opening. The scene needs to be created in a real time shader in 3dsmax and with rain effects.

I know how to name animated gif files in photoshop, but it seems max only accepts mov. files for animated textures. So can anybody help me out? How do I go about adding in rain using an animated file with opacity information?

Thank you!!

Eric Chadwick

Usually rain effects would be done with particles. Both the rain drops, and the circle ripples. You can do particles in realtime in 3ds Max.

You can also do a video texture in a shader if you make a sprite sheet, and use the shader to offset the UVs, swapping the images one by one. What a sprite sheet looks like:


If you want to create a rain shader, take a look at Shader FX, it's the best shader editor for 3ds Max.
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryShaders#Creating_Shaders

Also, I would ask the company for clarification on what they really want. I bet the rain itself is out of the scope of the art test.

.morph3us

you can use the bitmap slot and when you load the bitmap in the new window there is a checkbox called "sequence".
tick that and pick a file from within a numbered stack of files (e.g. smoke_001, smoke_002 and so forth).
you can do that with every fileformat max can read.

Eric Chadwick

Yes, this is usually the way to make an animated texture in Max (it makes an IFL file, a text file that lists the images). However it won't playback in realtime like a shader will, the performance will be very poor. YMMV. A shader is the way to go if you want a decent framerate. Unfortunately though a shader will take a bit more work to get going.

SinisterUrge

When I woke up to find these responses it made my day already. Cheers guys

SinisterUrge

I've been playing about with getting the animations working and trying out some shaders. Ideally I would like the animation in realtime. I tried the sequence and made an IFL file. Then a made a test render to see if I got any animation, but no joy. Any ideas? I'll keep experimenting and see if there is any success.

Thanks once again.

Eric Chadwick

IFL should play back in the viewport, just hit the Play button at bottom right. Depending on the length of the animation, and the size of the bitmaps, the playback might not be as smooth as you like. Because it is trying to load the bitmaps into memory. A sprite sheet avoids this because it's loaded once and kept there.

.morph3us

also, you might check how long your animation is, where it starts and which part of the timeline you are looking at.

if you are using a 2 second animated texture and look at it from second 3 to 5 it wont animate unless you put it on loop. check the material editor, you can set the starting point of your ifl there.

SinisterUrge

Got it working last night. Only issue now is with an alpha channel/opacity, but the animation works fine.

SinisterUrge

I still can't get the opacity/alpha working with animated textures in Max.

Eric Chadwick

Does the image format have an alpha channel?

In the Opacity channel, is this radio button set to Alpha?

SinisterUrge

Sweet, I got it working. I used tga format. Made two sequences, one for the alpha and the other for diffuse. Solved. Thanks everyone.

SinisterUrge

Using a directX Shader for some reason the alpha planes are blocking eachother. Does anybody know a way around this?

Eric Chadwick

http://wiki.polycount.com/TransparencyMap#Sorting_Problems

Simply detach each overlapping transparent element into a separate object, then re-attach them in the order you want them to draw.