slightly complicated material morphing question

[Sen3D]

Here's what I need to do:

Animate between 2 diffuse maps (the bump & specular will remain the same,). Simple so far? Cool.
BUT I need to be able to have a lot of diffuse maps & be able to choose between them & preferably also be able to add new ones as & when needed.

So, firstly I can use a mix or blend material in the diffuse slot because I'm only ever going to need to animate between 2 maps at any one time right? Fine, but say I animate a transition between map 1 & map 2 for 10 frames & then I need to animate between 2 & 3 for the next 10... If I just change the map in slot 1 that will change slot 1's map for the whole animation, meaning I go from 3 to 2 to 3 right?

I thought about having a mix or blend material & then putting multi/sub materials into each of the slots because then I could add materials as I went - BUT in order to select which map from the multi/sub list to use at the blend/mix level it would mean messing about with material ID's for the object. Not what I want.

I looked into the morpher material, but that needs to be attached to a morpher modifier & therefore morphs the material based on the actual morph targets - i.e. if you had one neutral target & an embarressed target, you could make the material automatically blush whenever you used the embaressed target.
Again, not what I want as I want the material morphing & morph targets to be totally seperate.

So far all I've come up with is to have a blend or mix map & then have further blend/mix maps in those slots & have a kind of nested effect going on but that's hardly user friendly when it comes to actually animating it.

Maybe I'm overlooking something obvious... hope so.
Any help appreciated.

[Sen3D]

Well, I've figured it out & decided to share my findings with you guys in case it helps someone else with a similar problem.

So far I've been using a composite material, which if you use the third option, (labeled M,) it allows you to animate between multiple materials without using any blending, which is what I wanted. It would have been preferable to set up a mix material in the diffuse slot & then have composite maps in each mix slot, but the composite map does not have spinners that allow you to animate the transitions between maps like the composite material does.

Quick tip for anyone doing something similar - with the composite material you have to set up the bump & specular maps/values for each material, (which is why I wanted to set it up so that it only affected the diffuse map,) so what you do is set up the base material of the composite, then copy it across to the others that you want to use & then just go in & alter the diffuse map. (or bump or specular etc, depending on what you want to change.)
Sounds obvious but I thought it was worth mentioning as it's easy to overlook.
Hope this helps someone else.