Animated material

Questions & Answers
1

I want a billboard-lights material that has animating lights.
So I made a scrolling-texture animation by animating the main texture offset.

Now the thing is, if I want something to have this material, I have to give that object an animation component and add that animation to it. And this also creates a new material for each object.

But I don’t want it to make copys of the material each time it’s used, I just want all these objects to use the same animated material without having to give it an animation component.
(So what I really want is to store that animation in the material somehow)

Does anyone know how I can do something like this ?

Edit:
I made a script to this instead:

var mat:Material;

function Update () 
{ 
    var offset:float = Mathf.Repeat (Time.time*2,1); 
    offset = Mathf.FloorToInt(offset*4)/4.0f; //clampen op 1/4
    
    Debug.Log("offset: "+offset);
    
    mat.mainTextureOffset.x = offset;
    mat.SetTextureOffset("_IlluminTex", new Vector2(offset,0));
}

only problem is that I don’t know what the Self-Illumination Texture is called.
Anyone knows were to find it ?

EDIT2:

found it, it’s “_Illum”
If anyone wants to findout how something else is called in the build-in shaders, you can find the shaders here: http://unity3d.com/download_unity/builtin_shaders.zip

2

If you are getting the material reference like this:

Material mat;
mat = renderer.material;

change it to this:

Material mat:
mat = renderer.sharedMaterial;

Using the first way will create a separate instance of the material. If you animate the sharedMaterial mainTextureOffset it will animate it for all objects with that material.

edit: since you edited your question with a script, in your script it would be:

var gameObjectsMaterialToAnimate:GameObject;
private var mat:Material;

function Start()
{
   mat = gameObjectsMaterialToAnimate.renderer.sharedMaterial;
}

function Update () 
{ 
    var offset:float = Mathf.Repeat (Time.time*2,1); 
    offset = Mathf.FloorToInt(offset*4)/4.0f; //clampen op 1/4

    Debug.Log("offset: "+offset);

    mat.mainTextureOffset.x = offset;
    mat.SetTextureOffset("_IlluminTex", new Vector2(offset,0));
}