[oannes]

Searched for a whie but did not found what I was looking for.

I want to animate the surface of a part of a machine, changing it from metal to glass.
How can I do this with maxwell?

Thanks a lot for answers!

[JDHill]

I would probably do this by having a duplicate of the surface -- so one with glass, the other with metal (just a bit above/outside the glass one), and then animate the Opacity of a Maxwell Object Properties tag, attached to the metal surface. The other approach would be to animate a Cinema material, which would be auto-converted differently on each frame, but I don't think it would work -- I don't think there's any way (may be, but I didn't try to find one) to do a smooth transition from a transparent, to a metal material.

[eric nixon]

Actually it can be done, by animating the position of a mapping channel (controlling a layer weightmap)... probably a B+W gradient type map.

You can make different kinds of fades depending on the map, and the type of animation given to it (rotations or linear moves)

Heres a little render sequence I made years ago as proof that it works;

http://www.mediafire.com/download/0sz5g ... q/fade.zip

Obviously any maps position can be animated, bump maps for example...

[JDHill]

Nice trick.

[oannes]

Thank you very much for your efforts!
I have tried JDHills solution.
Not really satisfying...

I would like to give eric nixon proposal a chance. So far I have not worked with such a method, which means, at first I will have to find out how to do that.

[JDHill]

What he means is that you would create one Maxwell material with two layers; one layer contains BSDFs to create a glass material, and the other to create a metal one. In the Mask map for each layer, you would then put the same map (say, a black-to-white gradient), but inverted in one mask, such that animating UVs for an object assigned this material, it would shift from using the one layer to the other.