Playing animation on surfaces?

[Kirado]

Hi, I'm a beginner to GLSL. I mainly an artist and know a tiny bit about programming etc.

I would like to know if there is anyway to play animations on the faces of the objects using GLSL. By animations I mean either a series of frames or an a AVI.

What I have figured out is that I can move the texture mapping co-ordinates in steps at a certain framerate over a texture map that has all the frames of my animation in it. This creates the illusion of motion like normal animations etc.

I would like to know if there is a better of doing this or if there some specific code that deals with this? Putting all the frames of an animation into a texture map can create large texture maps. Any help would be awesome thanks

[Lindley]

Best bet would be to do some sort of paging to/from the GPU.

[-NiCo-]

I'm using libavcodec (for avi decoding) in conjunction with a texture rectangle for storage. Each frame, I call glTexSubImage2D to update the texture data. It's probably best to use pixel buffer objects for asynchronous uploads so that the rendering pipeline does not stall while uploading the texture.