Hi guys,
It’s great to have the velocity channel to mapping2 automatically, but it’s not too useful now because of the range of the values. It would be great if we could dial a number to normalize the values to, so we can get a 0-1 value that we can easily use in the material editor.
Thanks
That’s really not the point of the feature. We are not copying the Velocity to Mapping2 so you can use it for mapping. We are doing it because Max has no concept of vertex velocity data in the mesh, so we need to put it SOMEWHERE 
If you need the data normalized, you can do it with Genome or a UVW Xform.
Oh I see, thanks. So is it used for motion blur then? I think I’ve seen that work without that checkbox on. For mapping- we just normalize in magma on the particles and send to a uv channel so it works, not a problem 
While 3ds Max does not support vertex velocity, Frost and XMesh do. So the actual Velocity channel exists internally and is used to produce motion blur. However, there would be no way to ask a TriMesh for the Velocity channel because 3ds Max does not know what that is. For example, Genome only shows channels that 3ds Max knows about, because other than with PRT streams, we actually reply on the mesh data pipeline of 3ds Max itself.
Hence the checkbox to copy the internal Velocity data (which btw is stored in Units Per Second!) into one of the 99 mapping channels, so you can access it using a channel 3ds Max knows about.
Cool, thanks