Animator animating material?

Unity Engine
1

I know the pipeline support animating Sprite Renderer for 2D…

What I need here, is to animate a spritesheet applied to a 3D mesh.
We have a mesh for the eyes and eye lids of a character. We want to animate that facial expression using a spritesheet. However, after a few research, I have the feeling the Animator support 3D OR 2D, but not 2D on 3D Mesh…

Is there any solution here?

2

You can animate the tiling offset of the material on the renderer; would that do the trick?

3

That would be rather painful to redo everytime your spritesheet changes…

4

There is no distinction for the animator between 2d and 3d, at then end the animator evaluate animation curve and blend them togheter.

For 2d the animation curve is a PPtr curve with allow us to animate any reference.

That been said there is no built-in component that can do that in Unity

But you could write your own component(MonoBehavior) that has Sprite property
animate that property
then the component script needs to do stuff to get that sprite onto that mesh manually
Sprite comes with uv information so it can be done.

Best regards,
Sonny