Q: I am trying to take a sphere with one material applied to it and morph it to another material. I need the morph to start at a specific frame and end at a specific fram. The sphere needs to remain the same, other than the material changing. Also, if it is possible, I wouuld like to morph the material starting on one side of the sphere and wrap around until it hits the starting area again (that is optional, I would like to get the morph working first). How do I accomplish this? The books haven't been alot of help. Please keep in mind that I am kinda new to this. Thanks in advance for any respoonses.

A: In general, there are different ways to do this:

*You can create a copy of the sphere, assign a new material, create a morphing in Keyframer and activate the Option "Morph Materials". This will cross-fade the materials - the one disappers, the other appears.

*You can do the same using 2 Texture Maps and a greyscale cross-fade animation that changes from black to white. You can put the animation as a Mask for the one Map and as Mask/Invert for the second.

*Using the second way, but with a wipe animation from left to right you can achieve the effect you mentioned. The easiest way is to create a rectangle,assign a self-illum. white material, put the rectangle outside of the screen on frame 0 and animate it to fill the screen. The resulting animation will change from black to white from left to right. Put this animation in the Mask slot for TMap 1 and inverted in the Mask slot for TMap 2. Apply spherical mapping coordinates to the sphere. The change will start as a meridian and turn around until the whole sphere changes the map. Same can be done from pole to pole with a vertical animation.

*In MAX, you can blend two materials together using a mask file. This will work there, too. A smooth cross-fade can be simply animated...