Dynamically animating mesh according to heightmap image sequence

Hi there,

My aim is to manipulate a mesh such that it looks as though it is a landscape undergoing various changes for a film I'm making that needs some real time, audio driven features (hence the use of Unity) - Interpolation between one terrain and another - Erosion animated in or Out of the landscape - Interaction of two separate landscape features on the same mesh

I at first generated a mesh and read pixel data from a heightmap in order to displace the mesh manually. I thought I could render out an animation sequence of heightmaps and have the vertices displace according to each of the images in the sequence.

It seemed more efficient to use a shader to drive this change so I used the Texture2D LOD node in shader graph to drive the y position of a plane with many subdivisions in unity, but I was achieving poorer fidelity than what is required for our project.

I then discovered that the HDRP Lit shader has a Displacement map built into it that achieves pretty good results, with built in tesselation.

I am wondering: Is it possible to pass procedural texture to the lit shader or a sequence of images in the way I have described? Does anyone have a suggestion on how best to do this?

Our Project demands that we get really good looking terrain features animating dynamically. I have high res heightmaps to supply whatever system I use. I am not too worried about performance as I will be recording and baking the output we create into a video.