OpenVAT
View full documentation at https://github.com/sharpen3d/openvat
Encode vertex animated textures (VATs) from your animated mesh for use in game engines and VFX. Bake any type of vertex animation: animated modifiers, animated geometry nodes, simulations, armature, shape keys, and more.
Exports an optimized VAT, a mesh with VAT-compatible additional UV set, JSON remapping data (to inform engine shaders), and optionally exports relative vertex normals in a secondary (VNRM) texture.
Install the satellite Unity package via Unity's Package manager for openVAT auto-import and setup tools for unity. Add via git with this URL - https://github.com/sharpen3d/openvat-unity.git
-See README in documentation for more details on Engine Usage.
Running the tool automatically sets up the newly-created VAT on an included geometry node method to decode the VAT and provides an example implementation and instant preview to check the quality of the generated information.
Encoding directly from dependency graph vertex information, this vertex encoding method is fast, accurate, and extremely powerful. Geometry node animations and simulations can be captured and exported accurately to game engines. Relative color space in RGB is remapped to MIN-MAX per-channel to represent the best-possible use of spectral information in RGB.
VATs are typically used for CPU optimization in game engines. With careful implementation in engine shaders, effects such as clothing simulations, complex character/creature animation, interactive/animated environmental effects and more can be driven by VAT on GPU.
What's New
1.0.2 July 29th, 2024
- Updated tagline to better reflect the use of this self-contained tool
- Code cleanup and commenting
- Nodes cleanup and commenting
- Improved Normals rendering process
- Added 'Packed' Vertex Normals method option
- this option allows for a position and normal map in one export map (still includes functionality to not include normals, or render on a separate map)
- Improved menu layout, tooltips, and user interface
- Caught and removed one unnecessary def
- Stripped and un-grouped enclosed node_groups, so appending does not bring additional node groups - major pass at node restructuring and organization
- Stripped all unnecessary data from resources
- Added delete/purge functionality in cleanup (does not accumulate data when cleanup is enabled)
The vertex animation output using this add-on worked perfectly in Unity! I hope that this add-on will grow into a standard VAT tool between Blender and Unity.
By the way, how can I make this FBX appear as a Particle in a ParticleSystem and animate it? In ShaderGraph, it seems like I could just input the Particle's Lifetime to one of the ports of the openVAT_standard node.
Thanks for this. More people should know about it. Great alternative to point-cache/alembic for game engines, especially for VR where Unity doesn't support alembic for performance reasons. Currently I'm trying to find a way to produce a result which would encode a simulation with subdivision surface post-simulation.