It might be easier to make your 16 frame image an animated sprite, and place it that way, unless you want to dig down into UV manipulation.
To use an object with an animated texture, you need to be able to alter the objects UV's to show the right frame of the image at the right time.
Its kind of like breaking the image up into frames, and pasting just a little bit of that image onto the object each sync..
There is a good example of the technique if you own DarkPhysics, there is a "water" sample, and it includes some splashes as some objects fall down into water, those splashes are actually small 3d objects, textured with an animating image, by manipulating the small object's UVs, it actually looks like the water is splashing up into the air and ripling when the objects fall into it.
Another way that you may be able to achieve what you want, with bullets anyway, is to use a particle emitter, setup the particles to be small and fast moving, texture them to look how you want, they would have to have a small lifespan, like millisecond, then you could place the emitter at the place where the bullets hit, and "fire" it.. you could even have different emitters textured differently or setup differently depending on what its hitting, a metal surface might spark, where a monster might have green blood splatter or something......
If it ain't broke.... DONT FIX IT !!!
