Text effects in 3DS Max...

[Ranma]

How do you make text transparent in 3DS Max? I've tried just about everything I can think of but nothing seems to work. Plus, the text has to fade in and out with the animation, so generally that involves changing the value of the alpha channel but you can't manipulate channels in 3DS Max like you can in Photoshop. We can always apply a transparent material like glass to the text but we want the opacity to change over time, and we don't want the text to be affected by any lighting or anything. I can't figure out how to do it in 3DS Max, but as a last resort we will use Final Cut Pro to add it in or even Flash if we have to. So please help someone! Don't make us use our last resort! Thank you.

[Daishichimaru]

Track view, find your text object, apply a visibility track, animate the values between 1 and 0 for opaque/transparent. Transparent being 0 and opaque being 1.

[Ranma]

DOOMO ARIGATOU GOZAIMASHITA!!!

[ComBBAT_Albrot]

There's actually a far simpler way to do that...
Just apply a material to the text, then animate the opacity... it animates just like any other feature in the program, just make sure you have the Animate button on and you're on the right frame.

[Daishichimaru]

Animating the opacity works, yes, but it creates more side effects than it's worth. Screwing with the material opacity doesn't touch specular levels, so you can have transparent text and a big specular flare blocking everything from your 'invisible' text. This can be solved by wiring the parameters together, but then you can't play with either value independently and if you have opacity mapped with anything it doesn't work well at all. The visibility controller acts independently of texture channels and actually mutes the specular levels automatically. It's also a lot easier to get rid of the changes if you so decide when you can just delete a controller instead of key hunting. Just something to keep in mind.

[ComBBAT_Albrot]

Very true, but I was working from the standpoint that a lot of teams seem to be coming from. A lot of people I've spoken to don't use track view, or even really know about its existence.

Thanks for the info, though.

[Ranma]

It's true that not a lot of teams know about the track view; I knew about it but I had no idea what it was until Daishichimaru told me what I can do in it. But it's not that hard to do the fade in/fade out effect anyways...so for some teams it might be easier one way, but we're doing it using track view.