Controlling movement of textures using individual keyframes within each texture can be time consuming, particularly when you may have several textures that need to move or scale together over time. It is possible to create a proxy object that can be animated, which in turn can control the offset, scale, and even rotation of a texture in a material.
Mapping material and texture settings to an object is easy in Blender especially if you use a non-renderable object like the Empty. An Empty object is one of the primary Blender objects like plane, cube, and sphere. It can be created anywhere in a scene but will never appear when rendered. Its purpose is to act as a proxy object to which renderable objects or textures can be mapped to. It is particularly useful when you want to control texture or material movement because you only have to map the material to the Empty and animate that rather than many material...