Has anyone ever successfully wired a cameras target to another parameter. I want to use the “target distance” as the master to alter the brightness of a material, but it doesn’t work. So i tried wiring it to other things, all of which take on the initial value of the “target distance” but do not update when its master changes.

i can probably get around my problem with a falloff map, but i’d like some closure to this problem. I may be doing something incredibly stupid or it may just not work. The help file does say all animatable properties can be wired, and the target can be animated so…

anyone got any suggestions?

Quad Core Xeon X5355 - 8GB DDR2 - nVidia Quadro FX 4600 - 3Ds Max 2010

Hmmm - why wire it? would a simple Select and Link not suffice?
Also, remember that the camera and the target are separate objects - you can get their individual positions and “do the math” to find the distance between them. http://area.autodesk.com/for...ance-between-two-objects/
If you put that in a script controller (attached to a track you don’t need) it should update automatically.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
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NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
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I wanted to wire it becuase the closer the camera gets to an object the brighter a glow gets, using the glare shader, so wiring the materials brightness to the target seemed like an acceptable solution to me. The problem i was having though was that the value in “target distance” inside the camera modifier panel, which would give the distance of the camera away from my object, does not affect any other wire-able parameters of other objects/materials.

thanks for the link, ill look at it in a while. this is just one of those problems that i want to understand before i move on, because regardless where the “target distance” value is coming from it’s not affecting any other parameter when wired to it!!

Quad Core Xeon X5355 - 8GB DDR2 - nVidia Quadro FX 4600 - 3Ds Max 2010