Hologram material – Part 2 – Animating the material

Here, I’ll try to explain how to make a nice hologram appearing effect, using an animated opacity map. Preview of the result can be seen in the next picture.

Opacity map is an animation of a black color turning to white (as shown on the picture below). Animations for opacity like this one are really easy to make even in 3ds max, but the process of making it will be explained in another tutorial. Avi file we are going to use in this tutorial can be downloaded here (1.avi).

Now let’s begin. Select a first empty material slot and change its type from “Standard” to “Blend”. Name the material “Hologram Material Anim” or something similar.

Newly created Blend material should look something like the picture below. As you can see, Blend material consists out of 2 material slots (named Material 1 and Material 2) and 1 map slot (named Mask). Material 1 is the start material, Material 2 is the end material and Mask defines how Material 1 is going to change into Material 2.

Click on the Material 1 slot to enter its options. Decrease the Opacity to 0.

Go back up to Hologram Material Anim and click on its Material 2 slot. Change its type from “Standard” to “Blend”. Name it “Holo Solid”.

Go into Holo Solid’s Material 1. Change its Diffuse color to white (R: 255 G: 255 B: 255) and Self-Illumination to 100 (as shown on the next picture).

Go back up to Holo Solid material. Drag & Drop the Hologram Material we made in the first part of this tutorial to the Material 2 slot.

Now, put the opacity animation to Holo Solid’s Mask map. Left click on Mask map slot and choose Bitmap. In a windows that pops out find and select the opacity map animation.

In bitmap options, scroll down to Time section and change the Start Frame to 1.

Finished Holo Solid material should look something like this:

Now, get back to the top material (“Hologram Material Anim”). Click on the empty Mask slot and choose a “Mask” map.

Mask map has 2 map slots and put the animated opacity map in both of them.

And that’s it. Material is finished. Now just put it on an object and render the animation. Result I got can be seen in this animation here (holo_anim_test.avi).

Hierarchy of the finished material…

… and the picture of it in material editor.

Note: After applying the animated hologram material to your model, put a “UVW map” modifier on it and choose planar as the mapping type. Next, change the axis alignment to “Y” and click on the “Fit” button just underneath. This will ensure that object starts appearing from the bottom.