Making animated textures using particle systems

Particles generally render onto sprites, or cards, or little XY planes. This makes them great as sources for animated textures, which are usually square too. It's sometimes cheaper to render particles to a texture and place the texture in the scene instead of an expensive emitter. We've seen in the second recipe in this chapter that we can use the SubUV of a texture to have frame based animation within a particle system. This time we're going to capture a particle system playing to a video file, and process it back in as a texture card. In the texture import process we can set a special texture type called a FlipBook that will let us cycle the SubUV tiles of a texture just like we can in Cascade, but in the Material Editor. This will allow us to use the particles as a texture to moderate other texture components. Examples where this might be used in a real game are numerous. The effect created in this lesson looks like a turbulent foam. It...