Puppet Tool Effect for Texture : Is it possible in Unity?

Hi, I was wondering if something like this is possible in Unity?

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/885847/puppet_tool_in_adobe_after_effects_cs3/

If it is, could anyone please give me some guideline as how to achieve this? Or something that will give the same result as in this trick?

The reason I want this is that I want smooth animation, but rendering this frame-by-frame is probably out of the question. Bone system plugins that are currently available on the appstore also won't deform the picture, so I guess that wouldn't work as well.

 

Well, in the example of the hand, could you not do something like this:

- create hand silhouette object in 3d program, with sufficient mesh to allow for animation
- texture silhouette with hand texture
- add bones to hand object, and skin to hand, so that when bones move, the hand does as well
- animate bones

Really, it's not much different than skinning a regular 3-dimensional hand. Would this approach have problems?

 

Yes, I did this before and it works. I was just wondering if there is a way to do this without having to make a model in an external program, since it looks like it's using vertices to display the texture and move them to distort it.

If there's an alternative way to do this I'd love to know it