Yea. Here is why.
8 fluid conduits, each animated using 4 frames.
8x4 = 32 tiles.
Each texture sheet holds 256 tiles. Our 8 conduit pipes suddenly use 12.5% of a texture sheet.
1 texture sheet at 256px resolution is a 4096 x 4096px canvas size. To work out the amount of graphics memory used, we do the following calculation.
A square 4k image that's 32-bit (8 bit per channel, RGBA) will use:
4096 x 4096 = 16,777,216 pixels
8 bits per channel x 4 channels = 32 bit = 4 bytes
4 x 16,777,216 = 67,108,864 bytes = 64 megabytes
As a general guideline, add 33% on for mipmapping in opengl.
We currently have 3 texture sheets loaded + mipmaps. Double this if you are using normal maps.
So it's not going to destroy everything if we have to add another sheet, but spending 12.5% of a texture sheet for the sake of 8 colours on a decorative conduit is foolish. Hopefully this explains a little better why i'm not animating everything and giving a colour variant to everything.