I’d definitely not use videos/GIFs for anything. You should take a look at UE4 materials (shaders). those you can make animated visuals by combining one or more images with math. Or create the visuals by only using math. That is how devs make things like moving clouds, wavy grass, fire, waves on water and many other effects. Does that answer your question? Sometimes a single image is divided into squares (usually for effects like fire) that can look “animated” by looping over it’s UV coordinates in a material. That is most likely what you were trying to do with GIF
I wanted to introduce animated skins for my character. I was trying to make something similar to Fortnite’s gun skins and Rocket League’s Black Market car skins, which are animated and look really cool. I’ve tried using GIF’s but they are way too heavy, one “long” animation is actually over 200 MB. I also tried using a flipbook to cycle through the images, but animations were both very limited in resolution and time.
So I was wondering how developers where able to have animated skins and not having HUGE size files. Please help me!
Thank you for taking the time to respond. Is there any reason for staying away from GIFs besides the file size? I forgot to mention that I also tried to use shaders, but apparently because of my uv unwrapping and the round shape of the character, animating with shaders results in weird ugly looking animations. So what I managed to do is to use procedural materials in blender and baking them into either GIFs or flipbooks. So I feel like there must be a trick to make animated skins. If you look at some Rocket League car skins, they are definitely not made with shaders, as the shape really changes.
So from what you responded, Flipbooks seem to be the only feasible way to go right?
I don’t know about flipbooks, I don’t use them. Shaders can actually deform objects or make them look like they are deforming in 3D space.