Feature Request: Flipbook component for animated matierals

[rainbj]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
During L&BC it was noticed that simple animated materials are VERY difficult to make inside O3DE. The only possible way is doing this through ScriptCanvas. However it's not performant and its limited to about 24 frames per sec before we start seeing engine crashes. Luis made an tutorial here which will get you in the ballpark but that took several hours to set up and configure - https://youtu.be/GYXG4nrQPnE

By limiting this process to only people who can use ScriptCanvas you make this difficult for the most important customer. Artist. I would like to lower the bar for entry.

Describe the solution you'd like

• A flipbook component that can take in a series of images in a sequence.
  • This component should have a flipbook size specification.
  • This component should have speed input: = 12 frames per second.
  • This component should have a loop requirement ( loop 1 once, loop x times, loop infinite )
• A secondary requirement would allow users to specify a sprite image instead of a series of images. This would require a users to specify number of rows and columns and image size.
  
  

Describe alternatives you've considered
This could also be added into the material editor itself and not done on component cards depending on the level of complexity.

Additional context
Please feel free to ping me @rainbj for more details.

[HogJonny-AMZN]

I think that first we should start with a flipbook .materialType / shader that can input the atlas flipbook texture and manages UV shifts (based on time), having params like AnimationSpeed and TotalFramesm, etc.
A component that wraps this is then a convenience, to make it easier to setup and use.
Then use script canvas to drive an instance of that material to control is state.

[rainbj]

@HogJonny-AMZN Using SC to do material animation was noticed to be slow and very limited to file size for sprites. We might want also want to build in performance improvements into the plan.

[jeremyong]

There's a new abstraction currently being implemented that would allow you to drive UV transforms in an efficient way to slide your UVs around an atlas each frame. This would have effectively zero overhead but would take some time to develop. Work has already started however.

[wintermute-motherbrain]

sig-graphics accepted this into the backlog on 2022-02-16