3DSM 5 Assigning animated textures to a material

Greetings!

This guide is created to aid people with 3d studio max 5.1 and wish to create models with animated textures, like Blizzard did with the water elemental for instance. Note that this does not include tvertex animations (in other words; animating the uvwrapping). First of all you have to meet these requirements:

-3dstudio max 5.1 ( I do not know how this is taken care of in 3d studio max 4.2 or lower)

-common sence

-Paint shop pro or Photoshop or rad vid tools (these are just for generating textures in a sequence. A example of a water sequence is uploaded as attachment (source: Ragnarok online by Gravity [sucky service!])

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This guide is fairly short as its quite easy.

-Create a mesh, object whatsoever with a uvwrapping. I suggest creating a plane for testing purpose.

-Open the material editor by pressing [M] (default) and create a warcraft 3 material. In the diffuse channel, choose bitmap, then hold on.

-Have a seperate folder with all your tga's of the animated texture sequence. They must have the same headername (check the attachment as a example)

-Back to the material editor, when you selected bitmap you can choose a texture. Select the first tga of the sequence and you will notice that at the left of the preview window there are two checkboxes. The right one is preview and the left one is sequence. Tag the sequence box and select and open the tga.

-A new windowbar will appear called "Image File list control". It will create a ifl file (which you should not bother with unless you wish to save the sequence information for later purposes). You will see in options:

start frame -> must be 0 (starting frame)
end frame -> must be the last number of your last frame. in case of the examples, it is 31 (starting frame)
every nth -> ignore, keep it at default!
multiplier -> ignore, keep it at default!

press the ok button and assign the material to your mesh.
Note that the material is automatically looped .

IF the sequence is way too fast, you should consider the following:
In the diffuse channel, goto the time tab. You will see several options, like start frame and playback rate. You can change the playback rate to fater or slower. If x>1=faster, if not then X<1=slower

These are for models that have a looping texture. However, its quite possible to adjust it in a way that out of two textures, one is shown for the rest of the duration after it had pased a certain frame (example= Mountain king). Just be sure that:

You only have TWO textures

In the diffuse channel, goto the time tab. You will see several options: check the end condition this time:select hold. This time the starting frame counter serves as the counter where it should jump to texture B (from A to B). It WILL remain that texture after that frame ( I havent seen other options, Ill update if I can find one), so plan it well.

Presented by:

Cookie,
Wc3c director

PS: the attached files are in BMP! So they will not work in wc3 previewer, use for reference only!
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Id been wondering how this was done, thanks, very good timing

Great! I thought that animated textures are impossible!

why?! where do i put the folder?

lol i made that post ages ago, and i found the solution ages ago, cookie you forgot to add in "tick the box that says include image path" otherwise my problem that i had occours.

so i need to make a whole mess of tgas to make it work...great...

do any of ya kno a good place to get fire?

maybe www.3dcafe.com

The balrog model from RightField has a really great animated fire texture, you might think about using that (just look rightfield up in the wc3sear.ch), its so large you can barely see the balrog's feet