Hi, Thanks for reading this after the insanely scary ('oh my gosh here comes a complete novice!') title. However i do have some quite specific problems. Firstly to the texturing - I have decided that due to my inability to create a lifelike human character atm (or more accurately in my time constraint) I am going to use my current character and texture it so it looks like a robot. Now i am going for the black and white plastic options for the colour scheme as i feel this will be most effective, but at the moment my character lacks - umm, shine! So the question is how can i make the textures appear to be more shiny? The second question isn't really about lighting. I am currently applying a bright yellow texture with a glow lens effect on it to give the appearance of a neon strip in some overhead lights. However i don't want the texture to appear until a certain frame when the lights are supposed to switch 'on'! Now i have thought about using a blend modifier so i could change the mix value at certain key frames but with 5 strips would i need a seperate texture for each strip in order to make them come 'on' at seperate times? Cheers for your help in advance Bonjour Neil

"So the question is how can i make the textures appear to be more shiny?" well this can be handled in many ways, and in many ways depends purely on the game engine you're using. Basically there are ways like environment mapping which fakes reflections, its simply a texture map being blended as a moviing reflection. there's actual reflections, this depends on your engine if this is possible, although its performance hit is bound to be too large for this to work. However if you simply mean specular shiny, this depends on if your engine supports this feature, and its kind of up to you on how to do it. and sorry but i can't help you on your second question.

Thats the one - if i adjust the specular properties of a material it should become more shiny - i knew it was something like that - just couldn't remeber which one.

I am using 3ds max 6 just for a quick 30 second or so animation so its just chnging the material properties that needs doing.

Ta very much for your help.

Neil