i don't really get what he does in that vid, but i agree that animated textures are the best way to go to make moving tracks in 3ds max.
What you need is a tiled track texture (i use one made by IllidanEvil that comes with his T80 tank), add it to a material of type "Warcraft", click the "duffuse" button, and check "tiled" in both U and V slot.
Now, when you make your UVmap for the tracks, unfold the entire track texture and put it in a single line. Since the tracks are tiled, it doesn't matter if they get outside of the "box".
The rest is done in magos; you open the texture animation window, right click, and press create new.
Check "translation", and click the "animation button. A window will appear with the following text:
This represent the texture position in XYZ at 0. (dunno what Z is for though!!)
Open up the sequence manager and check the start and end times for your walk animation. Let's say that it is 200 to 800.
Now, you can set the texture position at different times using lines like the one that showed up, just make it like this:
200: { 0, 0, 0 }
800: { 0, -10, 0 }
This means that the texture will move through 10 instances of itself during that time.
Here is the texture animation for my Tiger Tank:
2667: { 0, 0, 0 }
4000: { 0, -20, 0 }
EDIT: Make sure you also set an interpolation type other than "none", so that the tracks will move in a smooth fashion. Beizer and Hermite are best, but Linear requires lower filesize.
But aren't we forgetting something?
Ofcourse, you have to set the texture animation to the track material, so that it will use it!
Open the material manager and doubble click on the different materials and sub-materials until you find the one that uses your track texture. Then, just set "texture animation" to the one you just made (in a drop-down box).
You can now test view your animation through the animation controller. Adjust it as you please and make sure it fits.
However, magos is bugged and does not save what materials use what texture animation, so sadly, you have to do the tedious process of converting the model into .mdl and open it with notepad to set the texture animation id for the material to the id of your animation. Usually, the null id is 0 and the id of your animation is 1. The field you're looking for is called something like "TVertexAnim", or whatever, you can check the texture animation tutorial on this site, it wil lexplain it nicely.
