I have an animation where I am trying to animate a glow upon a surface.  Trying to show how when electricity shoots through a condutor it induces a magnetic field, which can be used to create a universal motor.  So I’ll have one coil radiating a blue hue, designating one pole whereas the armatuare will radiate a red hue.

These need to be animated, ramping up and down continent upon armature postion.  Hence my dilemma.  It appears I am up against a bug in 2009 max/mental ray whereby the lumonosities within mental ray materials can not be annimated.  They are either on or off.  Running a series of experiments that appears to be the case with the ray trace material as well as when I manipulate the lumonosity within an architectural material.  I tried to animate the visibiliyt of the geometry itself.  Reached the same place.

I am using the lens effect within the evironoment/effects tabs.  Not too thrilled with the results.  The glow has this annoying tendency to appear in front of geometry that is clearly in front of it—despite the size being low where in my mind this shouldn’t be a factor, while, at the other extreme, a wire far in front of the glow carves a bizarre gash into the effect

The bug with animating SI has a workaround. Animate the colour, or add an Output map to the SI slot and animate that.

hm.  Still not working in my scene.  Architectural material.  In the self ilummination glow slot, in the filter color swatch I throw an output map.  Here I animated the output amount, shifting the value from 0 at frame 1 to 1 on frame 10, for example.  What happens is that as it immediately jumps form no glow to all glow over the corse of 1 frame.

Have tried playing with all the sliders, buttons, etc.  to no avail

Man, does that mental ray glow look so much better though.  Can’t compare the two.