Material animation - Opacity & Normals Scale

Animating the Normal Map strength would be a very good feature addition as it would allow us to create certain effects very easily:

  • De-icing boots: instead of skinning the wing we could use an animated normal map for that
  • Icing: we can create custom icing types that MSFS doesn’t support and have them build up by controlling the “alpha cutoff” or opacity scalar
  • Condensation effects: that could also benefit from animated normals to emulate differences in transparency and turbulence