Best practices for animated interface textures on props?

Vertrucio

For the prop I'm working on now, I wanted to render in Unreal, and also get some of the graphical elements animating. I wanted to make the two screens on this handheld animate. The middle touchpad section I wanted to act like an e-ink screen to display more data. None of these are interactive, just animated for show.

However, I can't find any good tutorials on either how to do this, or what's the best way to do it for these purposes. So far as I can tell I can make some unreal widgets and just render them on the prop. Alternatively I can make something like a sprite sheet and play through frames on that sheet.

iam717

i've seen some artstations with cool animated projects i will update this post with them and or if i find them, i really enjoyed them when i did see them, perhaps the user that created them could chime in, but generally i think its a flipbook approach, give that a review until i edit this post with the ones i saw.

Scroll down:

My favorite one here

here

here

Vertrucio

Thanks, I think I'll whip up a simpler flip book for some early marmoset renders and as a kind of previs, then later when I have more time create an unreal scene with all the UMG widgets.

poopipe

if it needs to be actually interactive you want to use the widget stuff cos you definitely don't want to be trying to handle UI with standard shader/blueprint logic
if it just needs to change pictures/animate in response to a button press/state change of some sort then it's viable to handle it with shader parameters . 
it'll be a lot more performant as a material than with widgets