Animating textures via Time-Steps directly

Support Materials and Textures
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I wanted to try and animate a texture in Blender, coming from UE with the knowledge of the ‘Panning’ node, which uses the Engines tick.
Now Blender of course isnt a game engine (RIP blender game engine), but it does have a timeline, so a time/delta.

I saw some posts about animating textures via direct frame linking, but what I want to know is, can you instead take the actual ‘time step’ counter that you have at the top left of your viewport (or anywhere else really) that shows how far along the time line you are as a direct input?

So that when I do press Alt + A, my texture animates?

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Yes type #frame into the value (and press enter)
This creates a driver using the frame number as input.

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Use a math node to control speed

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Any way I can use it for a vector input to control a specific axis?

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Yes

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I tested the same aproach and accidentally input “#frame” into the wrong input, turns out, you can do it directly too since drivers work on any input.
But thanks, didnt know what the ‘combine’ node was called to use it.
image

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Yes, but you have more control if you use a value and math node.

You can edit the driver (in the driver editor) to be expression = frame/24, but with the math node it is easier to control and change the values without fiddling with the driver.

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