You'll need to animate it through vmt, and probably have a vmf for each frame.
Nope! Animated textures are just that, animated textures. They literally have multiple frames right in the VTF file, although you do still need to add a material proxy in your material file so the engine knows to actually animate them. Here's the relevant code:
Code:
"Proxies"
{
"AnimatedTexture"
{
"animatedtexturevar" "$basetexture"
"animatedtextureframenumvar" "$frame"
"animatedtextureframerate" 30 (or whatever you want it to be)
}
}
Just slap that on the end of your VMT and you're golden.
To make the actual texture, you'll need to actually have VTFEdit because the various export plugins (Photoshop, etc.) don't support animation. Save each frame as a separate file — don't forget to pad the dimensions out to a power of 2 first — differentiated by their frame number. Then launch VTFEdit, go to File > Import, and import all of your files at once. Make sure the texture type is set to "Animated Texture", which it should be by default. And that's all you really need to know.