Animated texture maps
Make a texture move: scroll it for flowing water and drifting clouds, or play it as a spritesheet flipbook, on any material channel.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
A Raster Map doesn't have to hold still. Every image texture carries an Animate setting with two modes (Scroll and Flipbook), and because both work by moving the image under the surface, they animate whichever channel the map is wired into: color, normal, roughness, emissive, anything.
Where the control lives
Select a Raster Map node in the material graph, or open the same node from Properties. The Animate dropdown sits just below Repeat and Offset in both places.
Scroll: flowing water, drifting clouds
The texture drifts steadily across the surface at a speed you set per axis:
- Speed X / Speed Y: how far the image travels per second, measured in tiles. 0.05 is a slow creep; anything past about 2 is a blur. The ceiling is 20.
- Your Repeat tiling is preserved, so a river tiled four times across a plane keeps all four tiles and slides them together.
The classic use isn't color at all: point a scrolling normal map at a flat plane and the surface ripples like water, with the scene's real lighting reacting to it.
Flipbook: spritesheet frames
If your image is a grid of animation frames, 3dCMS steps through the cells like film. Pick Flipbook and set:
| Field | What it is |
|---|---|
| Columns · Rows | The cell grid in your image, up to 64 each. Cells are read left-to-right, top row first. |
| FPS | Frames per second, up to 120. |
| Frames | How many cells are real frames: a 60-frame clip packed into an 8×8 grid leaves 4 cells blank, so set 60. |
| Loop | On, the sheet repeats forever. Off, it plays once and holds the last frame. |
A flipbook takes over Repeat and Offset (the cell grid drives them), so those fields are ignored while it's active.
When it doesn't move
- Animation runs while you build, whether or not the Play toggle is on: you can't author flowing water you can't see.
- Unless you asked for it to stop. If your own operating system is set to reduce motion, animated maps hold on frame one in the editor too, the same as particles and keyframes. Turning the OS preference off brings them back.
- Visitors who ask their device for reduced motion see frame one, held still.
- Publish screenshots and AI scene captures freeze on frame one too, so a share card looks the same every time.
- Setting Scroll back to zero speed (or a flipbook grid back to 1×1) makes the map plainly static again.