How to...Animate Scrolling UVs

This describes how to scroll UV co-ordinates on a material in 3DSMax using the Rail Simulator tools. Once a polygon or groups of polygons are mapped with UV co-ordinates, these co-ordinates can be scrolled. In this case, the texture doesn't change, it simply 'slides' across the surface at a given speed and in a given direction.

Examples of this type of animation would be:

- The lavaflow from a volcano down a mountainside
- Waves at a beach
- Falling water in a waterfall
- Scrolling text on a dot matrix board

This feature is ony supported on some of the simpler shaders (for example TexDiff, AddATex).

To get this working, browse the material roll-out and find the 'UV Special Effects' area of the material. Simply tick the 'Scroll UVs' button, and specify a scrolling speed in U and V. Which values to specify for these two speeds depends on how the polygons are mapped in the first place. Try it out for yourself.