One of my game ideas is a walking sim. I’ve been considering how best to design this game, and one of the ideas was that exploring and interacting with the environment would trigger animated scenes that depict a child’s challenging experiences while growing up. These scenes would be attached to objects, like walls or terrain. I’m going to explore a few ideas on how to make that work.

Hey, Google, how do I “unity attach a gif to an object”.

First, we need a material.

Make one from any regular image:

  1. Put your source image somewhere in Assets.
  2. Create a new Material, put it somewhere in Assets.
  3. On your new material’s inspector pane, find the “Main Maps” section.
  4. Click the little circle to the left of the ‘Albedo’ entry, then select your image from the Assets folder.
  5. Next, create a Plane, (Right-click in scene > 3D Object > Plane)
  6. On your new plane’s inspector pane, find the Mesh Renderer component.
    1. It might be helpful here to lock the inspector pane (Right-click on “Inspector” and select “Lock”)
  7. Drag your material into the Mesh Renderer’s Materials section, in the “Element 0” box (or click the circle and select your material from the list)

However, the most promising approach seems to be to convert it to an mp4 and use movie textures.

More materials and such.

I wanted to get a text bubble plane that was just a child object of a character, and would rotate on the same axis etc., but really struggled with getting the transparent parts of the png to actually look transparent.