Animated textures in Layar

As of Layar 3.5, the textures applied to models can be animated to create simple looping elements or to animate environments. They can be either natively supported through GIF animation or by establishing an image sequence once exported to the Layar converter (only in the latest version).

To  experiment with this, I created a water texture by simply offsetting my ocean tileable texture by 20% for 5 frames of seamless wave motion. It is important to remember the limitations of the devices processing the animations, and Layar recommend a maximum of 10 frames and all the images or frames must be 256x256 (512x512 is not recommended either). I found that compressing the images significantly improved the file size, another one of the qualms of the animation support. Knowing the temperamental nature of Layar, I kept as far under the bar as possible, and with just a simple animated cube managed to get some promising results.

The alpha channelling for transparency can also be incorporated into the animations... but I haven't attempted that just yet, but it could be very useful for creating the illusion of moving parts.