I’ve got to make a digital video for my year 12 multimedia class, and well I wanted to make everyone jealous. So I thought id record myself moving around doing all kinds of funky things with my hands, then do some magic (3d water floating in air, me controlling with hands). and well my water is made and its materials are perfects and it looks the way I want, although i’m not quite sure how to import the video i’ve recorded of my self into 3ds so that I can then animate where my rippling water will go, and then finally render.

Ive tried making the avi as the environment map and a few other things but i couldnt do it, im just out of ideas now.

thanks for any help provided.

Ive tried making the avi as the environment map and a few other things but i couldnt do it

Putting the video in the Environment Map slot should work, but you won’t see it in the viewport unless you set it as the Viewport Background too. It should be visible in the render, but you will need it in the viewport to get the animation right.
If you are having problems I recommend converting the video to an image sequence and importing it as an IFL for the environment, you may want to create a lo-res version of the sequence for the viewport background to make it faster.

You are on the right track, use Bitmap in the Environment slot, then Instance not Copy to the material editor. You appear to have problems with loading the AVI, so it could be a codec problem. Are you using a 64 bit version of Max? That could be it.
Again, I suggest converting to a sequence and using that instead, no more codec problems and easier on your resources.

I know I really should not complicate things for you at this point since you are having problems with the basic setup for a composite shot, but I have some tips for doing composite shots involving transparent refractive materials in this thread. It is a bit more complex and utilises the mr production shaders. Something to consider for your next project maybe.

Use whatever software you have available to convert to an image sequence. For better quality use a lossless image format like PNG or TGA rather than Jpeg, they are still compressed so won’t be huge, but the picture is not degraded.
To load it use Bitmap as usual and browse for that file type, not IFL, choose the first frame and enable the Sequence option so Max knows it’s a sequence of files, an IFL will be created.