So I’ve rendered out a sequence of normal map images all neatly tiled and loopable, but I can’t figure out how to use them to generate an animated normal map for my material. I’m trying to make a water material with animated waves. I’m pretty beginner level at unity materials and I’m perfectly comfortable making static textures, but can’t seem to figure this out for the life of me.
Well, I’ve made some progress here, in a way. I’ve tried 2 methods. The first I just use a handful of the renders and interpolate them over time. This gives me decent gently-panning sparkly water but isn’t quite as realistic as I’m looking for. The second method I’m trying seems promising but has been unsuccessful so far. For this method I’ve made a sheet containing all of the render images. I’m able to pan through the frames, but I don’t wan’t it to pan smoothly, I want it to ‘jump’ to the location on the sheet that contains the frame I need.
The easiest way to go about this might be to with a c# script. Have a script swap the normal map texture on your material. Have a script with an array of textures and step through the array based on time each update.
An alternative is what you already figured out part of with the one big texture with all of the normal map frames in it. What you have is called a texture atlas or sprite sheet, though for what you’re trying to do the term you want to search for is “flipbook”. There are a couple of example shaders out there for that if you search around.