EASY max question about alpha...

keizza · Oct 2018

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 · Oct 2018

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 · Nov 2018

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 · Nov 2018

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.

EASY max question about alpha...

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