You're right, it doesn't need to be fancy. But with the new 3D model, a sloppy pixelated animation would be like putting a 4 year old drawing in a museum. I'm aiming to something short, clear, smooth and nice enough to be seen at any screen resolution.
Of course, Darth Parametric was also right by saying it's just a small object that appears in a cutscene and a couple of times on the ground in some quests. So, it's still early in this project. But I hope to learn enough to add it on some desk or kiosk or something like that. Maybe even in the Ebon Hawk. But right now it's just some wild idea in my head.
I'm happy that you bring that up. It was my first obstacle I've encounter with the animation. I did made animation for a project and I tried to use is as an exemple. But the template was in 8K 60fps. so scaling it down was a ugly nightmare. Not that I couldn't do it. Even with an Ai software I had at work it was horribly pixelated and looking dire at 1024 pixels. So the sample I use for the exemple is just a simple .gif found on internet with 68 frames. So the 8x8 came from there.
I did test the new .txi parameters, but with no availed. The animation is still weird. But it came up to me today. I did encounter something similar with a animate .vtf for another game. The bug was it had many frames repeated for the video I used. I thinking it might be the case here too. I will not promise anything for the next few days. But I'll try to post an update that will not make me ashamed of my results.