Animated interpolation between two textures.

Can this be done with textures in a shader? http://cmm.ensmp.fr/~beucher/interpol/interp5.gif
I’m looking to build a planet with animated titonic plates and was thinking the smartest way of doing so is to interpolate between a set of diffuses and normals. because a regular spritesheet would make every frame to low res.
I’m ready for this being expensive and I’m only going to render the planet in a skybox to save all power to whatever the solution for the moving plates will be. I even consider making an animated movie of the normal and diffuse and playing them on top of the planet. but Im thinking this interpolation deal is better if its possible. so my question is
how would you do it?
whats the best solution?

Hello,

You can make blend easily with materials, using a lerp.

After the setup is done, you can convert the constant plugged in Alpha in parameter and change the value from a blueprint.

Yes that’s awesome! I tried this method but it dose not accomplish something that looks like the GIF. If I have two textures and put the lerp to 0.5 I get a transparency 0.5 on both textures while in the gif one would warp into the other. The point of the effect was to make it as smooth as a morph or blend shade in 3D transitions. but maybe this is a settings somewhere?

Thanks again :slight_smile:

let me illustrate my feelings.
it would work with other things that are naturally transparent like particles or clouds but not really continents :confused:

That is a really specific and detailed animation, I think that will be hard to do that in shader.
Will it be okay for you to use MovieTexture ?

Edit : There is still the flow map way but I do not know all the way to make it work. Flow map are a special texture in which you store the direction in which the pixel should move. A typical example is rivers, that follow a direction and move differently near rocks. The flow map can be applied on the diffuse and the normals. However, I think it will be tricky to make this map and I am not sure of the control you can have on it. But it may be a way of search.

Hello, yes initially I was thinking movie texture as well, I just whanted to chek with you guys if there was a dynamic way :slight_smile: And I’m only rendering the planet so I guess I can afford movie based textures.