Surface shaders with flipbook / spritesheet animation functionality
This is a surface shader solution for flipbook animation with spritesheets in Unity. I've been using this so that I can add shadows to flipbook animations without going through Unity's sprite system.
Setup is relatively simple:
Improvements / suggestions for other variations:
For foliage -- blend the bottom of the geometry with the ground by orienting the normals to the surface. This is easiest for flat surfaces with which you can just set the normals to point upward in a vertex shader.
Try implimenting billboarding -- In the past I've used this solution to good effect: https://gist.github.com/renaudbedard/7a90ec4a5a7359712202, note that it won't batch correctly out of the box.