Q: I used an animated opacity map and it worked great till frames just started dropping out. (by frames dropping out, I mean that everything rendered except the object with the opacity map. It just showed up as if one of the frames in my animated map were all black(transparent). The next frame would render just fine and a few frames later another one would show up completely transparent) Also, I checked every frame in the animated map, none are black/blank.

I used a 25 frame .FLC (didn't mess up till about frame #11)
I used a 50 frame .FLC (didn't mess up till about frame #20)
Then I figured I'd try a 500 frame .FLC and only fill the first 50 frames (started messing up around frame #15 or so)
I figured it might be a bug with the .FLC format, so I did all the former combinations in the older .FLI format.... Same problem on all of them. Also, this was reproducable. If I render frame 1 to 50 frame 11 drops out, and if I render frame 11 to 50 frame 11(the first frame of the segment) drops out again. I also tried adjusting the frame rate of the animated maps. I used 0,1, and 5 thinking maybe it was a timing problem...... that didn't work either. :(

I'm not sure what else I can do... any more ideas? I think I just about covered everything. I'm going to try using it as a animated texture map instead of opacity map, maybe that will have an effect. Also, for people that are wondering about my settings, I used most of the defaults in the Mapping Parameters screen (the [S] button after the file button). I set it to DECAL with 0 blur and 90 deg rotation, scale is 1.0 on the rest.

Please let me know if there are any other tricks I may be able to use to fix this problem. I'd have to give up a VERY cool effect if there is no fix. Thanks!

A: The DECAL setting works this way: it takes the upper left corner pixel's index and makes all pixels with the same color index transparent on the whole frame. If you have a black&white Flic in the opacity channel and a white pixel happens to appear at that first pixel on frame 11, the whole white part of the image would disappear from the opacity channel, making it totally black.

Any other settings have no meaning since an animated map shows a frame per frame regardless the speed settings of the flic. The flic repeats if the scene has more frames than the map. A 50 frames flic is about the same size as a 500 frames flic with 450 black frames at the end.

If you can, use Tile instead of Decal, or make sure your 1st pixel has always the background color or a color index not used in the frame (You need Autodesk Animator Pro or similar for this)

R: WOW! Thats it!!! My animated map has a sequence of white bars moving accross a black background. It is dropping out in sequence with the white bars covering the first pixel. That explains why it drops out and comes back. It also explains why animated maps with different bar sequences dropped out at different times. I can't thank you enough.