bagginsbill posted at 5:31AM Fri, 12 April 2019 - #4349964

Customarily we use the word "texture" to refer to one or a set of images that are used in a shader to control color, bump, opacity, etc. If you are using the word texture in that way you are asking how to use a movie as an element of a material shader instead of a still image. That would be the Movie node.

If, instead, you are saying texture when you actually mean shader, then the answer is that you animate one or more parameters of the shader which would alter the resulting render frame by frame.

For your second question, it depends how you want the "spread across them" to happen and also where the color change should be applied. If the color is already a parameter of the shader (not an image) it is quite straightforward to animate this color. But if you want it to spread selectively over some pixels but not others, or to spread in some predictable way, you'd go in one direction. If you wanted the color change to spread in a pseudo random way like ripples spreading in a pond, you'd go another way. I don't know the "De Blob" style so not sure what to tell you. Do you have a reference animation link we could look at?

There are many random-ish pattern generators in material nodes you could use to evolve the color change. I don't know which one to suggest. And there are literally millions of ways to combine them in altogether different outcomes.

Do any tutorials exist for the manipulation of shaders in the way I'd want to do?

De Blob Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3p64V5PO_M