i’d like to set up a 3dlogo animation which should work like this:

you have the logo and some robo arm or whatever ( not quite sure about this yet ) something should touch the logo at a specific point and from there on the material should change to an x-ray like one; but i don’t want it to just fade from one to the other; i’d rather like some transition that starts from that specific “touch-point” and grows like weed in some very inordinate, natural manner in all directions.
hope i could explain what it should look like and someone has an idea;
best regards

used to work on Dell workstation in a 3dsmax2010/64t - based workflow - win vista. 64; converted ; don’t miss a thing !

Sounds more like an After Effects thing, but you could try creating the two materials, then use an animated mask (say, by animating smoke, cellular, noise, etc), to make a nice transition between the two material types.

Software:
3ds Max Design 2012 [64bit] - Awaiting SP / Hotfix
Boot Camp (2.1) Windows 7 Ultimate [64bit] - SP1

Hardware:
Apple Mac Pro (3.1):
- 2x 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 (8-core)
- 6GB (2x 1GB - 2x 2GB) 800MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM
- ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB GDDR5 - Driver: Catalyst 9.9

Max on a Mac: Life doesn’t get much better!

well forgot to mention that the whole scene should move ( cam at least) masking in postproduction would be quite an effort; the problems with smoke, noise,.. is that they would produce several stains over the whole surface and don’t allow me to let the transition start from that one point ( well i could animate the uvw gizmo but that would give me visible seams for these procedural maps except i combine one of those with some gradient but that again would be too regular and not the effect i desire ) ; just thought about a vertex paint mask; can one animate these growing further and further ( not by a frame per frame basis ), never tried before ? 

cheers

used to work on Dell workstation in a 3dsmax2010/64t - based workflow - win vista. 64; converted ; don’t miss a thing !

You could create a lightning/weed-like like graphic in any 2D program and use that as a mask,
or I’d probably use the lightning effect in After Effect and use the video as the mask.
These people have some cool effects for After Effects that might be a nice animated mask,
but you could easily build your own.

http://www.videocopilot.net/

Max 2012
Windows 7 64 SP1

I painted an animated vector mask in After Effects and used it as the mask in a Blend material.
Not a sophisticated example.

Max 2012
Windows 7 64 SP1

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