the only way i see it using 3ds max is by animating fading object material opacity. Try animating opacity from 100 (no transparency) to 0 ( invisible) trough 100-200 frames or what time do you need.

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The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein

and how doth I doeth that..eth.. ?

(and lol, I have no idea what I as doing to the keyboard at the time of writing the title!)

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use the visibility track. turn on auto key. right click> object properties>change visibility to zero. once a key is set there will be a visibilty track in trackview. or just move the timeslider>right click again>object properties> and change the visibility value to fade in.

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Right. Tried that. Didn't work. I don't know why. I even found a tutorial on how to use a visibility track and went through it, still didn't work. I thought maybe it was some setting that just wasn't showing me the animation fade in the viewport, but it doesn't even show when I render the thing. As I track along the animation timeline, it even says "object visibility 0", "object visibility 0.435" etc etc if I click on object properties throughout the animation.

Do I need to do something? Like enable something on the materials that are on the objects, or enable something else somewhere maybe?

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If I open a new document, make an object, apply a texture, animate it, add a daylight system, add a light, then add the track and fade it - it works fine. So it must be something in the other file that's doing it

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after attempting to animate thing several times now, it's randomly changed to showing me what I want in the viewport, but when I render it, the thing just appears out of thin air in 1 frame..doesn't fade in, it just pops up and it's there.. :?

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I'm not really sure man. Ive never had any problems with visibility before. you could try keying the opacity of the material as was suggested. thats gonna give you the exact same result but at the material level.

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i would never thought of visibility track haha good one, and i also never had problems with it, i really don't know what could cause the problem. Have you tried google some tutorials on that subject? also try opacity keying it's the same thing as Tyson said, only on material level.

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The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein

aw man..The problem with using the gradient ramp in the materials thingy, is the fact that I have the same material on several different objects, and those objects need to fade in at different times. Anyone have a clever solution to that ?

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where did you place your gradient ramp? it shouldn't matter what you use, just go to the material it self by clicking go to parent and animate the opacity. For different objects, just copy the material, change it's name and assign it to different object, change opacity animation and there you have it, two different objects fade in or out at different time

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The secret of creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
-Albert Einstein

It looks like this so far

[Link to www.youtube.com]

so what I've had to do, is just move everything out of camera view, keep the camera still (I wanted it to be flythrough-ish) and just move the things into the scene, rather than have them fade in.

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you can make copies of the materials and re-apply them to each object. also you only need to animate the opacity value, no need to use a gradient ramp.
I'd say persevere with the visibility track. it can be confusing if you havent really delt much with keyframes before.

just do it in this sequence to make something fade in.

1. pick the object.
2. turn on auto key.
3. right click the object>object properties.
4. set visibility to zero>hit OK.
5. No key is set yet, scrub to frame 20.
6. right click>object properties.
7. set visibility to 1.0
8. keyframes are set at the beginning and at frame 20.
9. you can now shift copy these keys to fade in and out and change the timing.
10. If in doubt open the curve editor and look at the interpolation between the keyframes.

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jep, it looks fine. The graph says it should fade in, but it doesn't. When I render it, the object just blinks on the frame where the visibility is 0, nothing else.

Right, here's something else wierd. If grap the object (i.e. the group) and export it (just the group) and then close 3dsm, open a new document completely, import the document, then do the visibility fade, it works. So there must be something in the 3dsm file itself, something in the settings that is not how it should be. God knows what that could be :/

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grap = grab.

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Yeah no idea. I'd just merge everything into a new scene in that case. you don't want to be working with a scene that has some weird corrupt stuff going on. It could be something to do with the grouping. ie: the objects in the group inherit properties from the parent and in the case of the group there is an invisible parent object.
You could be better off ungrouping the objects and using a dummy instead. Link all the objects to the dummy ctrl object then animate the dummy. visibility will be inherited to all the children.

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