Week 11- Research into the Morpher Material

One element of our animation is for the dredger to partly fade away to reveal the machine inside. As this part of the animation has been allocated to myself I have spent some time this week researching a possible way of achieving this in 3Ds max.

There was only one tutorial I found which had any relevance to what I was trying to achieve, this being a material morpher (see http://www.freewebs.com/adriantiba/morpher.htm) To see if this was usable I did a trial of the method.

I began by creating a box in the perspective viewpoint. I then opened the material editor and created two materials in different material slots. Next I went to a third material slot and clicked on the button labelled ‘standard’ to open the material browser window. From the possible options I chose ‘morpher’ as the type.

This brought up a level in the material editor window with several blank material swatches. I then dragged the two materials I had created into their own morpher channel.

Following this I selected the box in the viewport and applied a morph modifier to this from the modifier list. Then I returned to the morpher material in the material editor and from the morpher rollout clicked on the ‘choose morph object’ button. I then selected the box in one of the viewpoints and in the window which appeared highlighted ‘morpher’ in the list before selecting the bind button.

Now the materials were established and linked to a morphing shape I went to the modify panel and when at morpher lever turned on auto key. Then at different points along the timeline I added key frames by changing the morpher percentage.

This had gone well, however for the group project I would have to apply this to selected parts of the shape only. I had a go at this as otherwise the method would be irrelevant to the project.

This time to start I created a sphere and made it into an editable poly. I then entered polygon mode, selected several of the polygons which made up the sphere and set these as material ID 2 while leaving the remainder at ID 1.

When I created the material for this shape I did so in multi/sub object mode so I could experiment with morphing two materials on the same object at the same time. Once happy with the materials I created again a morpher material and continued with the process detailed above, but this time assigning the material to the sphere.

This material also morphed successfully and so I feel this is suitable to incorporate in the animation.