Eye Blinks with Animating textures - possible?

[DoomsbergA]

Hey, I have been considering an easy way to get my characters eyes to blink every 7 seconds or so. I had considered using mesh and bones to move stuff around to make my character blink, but based on the current situation I cannot have that happen along with other animations at the same time. So I thought of a new idea, why not using a animating material to show the eye-lid coming over the eye?

This idea has the potential to work well, but I have come across a possible problem. For about 6 seconds of the animation the eye will be exactly the same, but during 1 second or so I want the texture to change. To make this look ok I need at least 5 frames per second. However, I don't want to have to make 30 frames of the eye being the same as it's a waste of memory and time.

So here comes the final question, is there someway to make it so that the same texture will show for 6 seconds or whatever, then make it animate very quickly for the blink? Or if not, is it ok to make 30 textures exactly the same, or will it result in bad performance.

If someone else has another idea on how to achieve blinks that would be really cool. If there is no suitable method I guess I can go without, but it woulda been nice.

Thanks in advance, Andrew.

[xavier]

Why not just use pose or morph animation? What situation prevents you from that?

[DoomsbergA]

I am planning to use the Mutliverse toolkit which uses a slightly varied version of Axiom. They haven't given much information about what is possible, and I don't know much about pose or morph animations. However, I will go check up on them.

Thanks, Andrew.

[Mikachu]

Another solution if you want to stick to a textured blink is to make two textures, one with eye texture, and the other with the eyelid. Then you blend with both textures (need an alpha map in the eyelid texture), with two distincts sets of coordinates; then you just have to animate the eyelid texture coordinates set (and this way you have continuous solution, not one with n fps).
You can either do it with fixed pipeline or vertex shader ( with a float parameter for the position of the eyelid)