About the whole talking and nobody caring thing I know how you feel exactly, I follow a fuck ton of indie game people but Im 100% sure that none of them know/care who I am. I guess the only way you can get through to people via the internets is by making something big, and my games are not even close :( , would've thought yours were though!
And unfortunately I don't have time to get into the nitty gritty of shaders etc. although I have touched them briefly before (not an expert however). My suggestion would be (I know this sounds crazy) library/buy a book on shader design/3d lighting, even if its not for a unity/c# implementation if its good it will have a good explanation of wtf is going on and how to implement in any lang.
PS FUN FACT: Do you remember when you made shooter/cannon runner game thing and won the Max Games contest (well you placed at least I cant remember)? I made a game for that too except that it was shit and it had scope issues so it never got finished :(
SPace
writing shaders is incredibly difficult. if you need help with getting art/textures/bumps/normal maps into unity i can help you out. and that plug-in for shader writing looks pretty awful, no node graph should be that ugly. there should be a way to save out your max materials as material files(.mtl?) or baking them to your meshes?. i use maya instead of max and everything ports into unity pretty well. and i know how difficult getting animations going can be, and then triggering events from animations. also for your animated texture are you using an .mov file? i've only ever done animated textures for GUI stuff. pm me and i'll see if i can help you out any. i'm still in the works on my first unity game. <a href="http://stevepett.com/Chiaroscuro/build_3_19.html">http://stevepett.com/Chiaroscuro/build_3_19.ht ml</a>
I-smel
If you click on the part where I talk about the Unity forums then you can see how i'm doing everything.
The animated texture is one long sprite sheet with all the animation sprites. I used C# to zip the UV of the texture to the left so it'll play, the same way a film reel works.
That way I can use transparency, and nothing has to be a massive video file.
I tried putting ramp lighting on a shader and failed, and I tried having a self-illumination map that's only visible where the object is illuminated- but failed at that aswel. I'll see if 3DS can export them any better.