Flux and Flicker: Animated and Special Surface Materials

The home and showcase of animatedMaterials, a collection of 28 animated and special surfaces for the Swatchbook material library (materialLibraryKit). Install the package from ZeroMind (search "animatedMaterials" or "Flux and Flicker"): it brings the library along, and every material appears in the library's list, picker and swatch gallery for every player, with no setup code.

What is in it

• Flowing water (clear river, murky river, toon water) and flowing lava (crusted, toon), each use with its own flow speed and direction; the lava glows by itself.
• Conveyor belts (rubber, steel slats) and treadmills (gym, sci-fi walkway) whose stripes travel at a speed in metres per second; the Conveyor component gives the belt's collider the same speed, so a crate rides exactly with the stripes.
• Wind-blown cloth (cotton flag, canvas banner) with live wind strength and direction.
• Pulsing lights (a breathing panel, an alarm strobe) and holograms (blue, glitching red).
• Dissolves (ember, arcane, digital) with a glowing edge, frost spreading over glass (realistic, toon), wetness drying on stone paving and asphalt, and a spreading burn (wood, toon), each driven by an amount from 0 to 1.
• World-aligned rock, forest ground, brick masonry and painted metal for objects without good UVs.

Every live setting is changed the same way, per object, for every player including late joiners: require("~animatedMaterials.Live").set(object, "flowSpeed", 0.3). Motion runs on a shared game clock: the same on every machine, slower in slow motion, frozen when paused, and still moving while you edit.

In this world

You arrive on a deck facing a stepped, curved stand that holds all 28 materials at once: four rows, each higher than the one in front, the amount-driven and world-aligned ones under the SPECIAL banner in front and the moving ones under ANIMATED behind. One look from the deck shows every bay with its name and a short description. Each bay shows its material on a sphere, a cube, a shader ball and a cylinder, a floor tile and a wall at real size, beside its reference picture, under the library's six lighting looks. Turn round and a ramp leads down from the back of the deck to the demo yard: on the left a lava channel, a conveyor carrying a crate, a flag in the wind and a hologram sign; on the right a crate dissolving in and out, a frosting window and a drying wet patch, each with a sign that reads from the deck.

Texture memory: 6 MB for all 28 materials (22 are procedural and use no textures), 15.3 MB with the gallery's reference pictures. The package README has the first example, the full list of materials with their live settings and ranges, conveyor pairing and the known limits.