3DS MAX Tutorials : Switch Materials in mid-animation

What I’m about to show you is a very simple trick to change the texture your object is using in mid animation. This can be achieved very simply but I noticed that I couldnt find any tutorials on it anywhere and Its not always easy to figure out unless you have a good understanding of 3dsmax. So to begin I want to make this red sphere turn blue at frame 50.
red sphere
So to begin I want to open up my materials editor and have both my red material and my blue material ready.
material editor
Find a material slot you are not using and change the material type from standard to blend
switch to blend
Next create your blend texture by dragging and instance of your red texture into one blend material slot and drag an instance of the blue texture in the other blend material slot. Finally apply the blend texture to your sphere.
From here we have to decide how we want the texture to switch over. Do we want the texture to switch instantly from red to blue or do we want to gradually fade from our red texture to our blue texture. Ill first show you how to fade although it’s the same exact process for both.
So I am going to set up my scene so that the sphere changes from red to blue over ten frames at frame 50. So to begin I need to turn Autokey on.
Autokey
Next bring the animation slider to frame 50. On the blend material setting change the mix amount to 100% and press enter. You should notice a little red box appear next to it. Finally go to frame 40 and change the mix amount to 0 and press enter. animate texture
Turn off Autokey and your done.
When you play the animation the material will gradually fade from red to blue. If you want an instant change just adjust the keyframes so that it changes over 1 frame instead of 10 like I have set up. This simple concept has so many applications and is very useful. What we basically done is animated our texture. All the texture attributes can be animated in the same exact way