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Add-on OpenVAT
OpenVAT

Encode and preview vertex animation textures.
Add-on by sharpened

5 Reviews

Very interesting addition. Thank you for your work! In one of the comments, the question was asked "Is it possible to make it support EEVEE or Cycles? I want to try it for crowd animation." You answered that this is done by default, but in my case no settings in the shader happened. Can you give more detailed information?

Is it possible to make it support EEVEE or Cycles? I want to try it for crowd animation.

This is done by default, after creating a vertex animated texture, by default it is automatically created as an EEVEE/Cycles shader. Feel free to reach out with any questions!

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.

You can apply subdiv post-simulation without issue. To do this, simply after the vat is created, take the new object 'yourObject_vat' and apply the subdivision in modifier stack. You will notice it still works correctly when you scrub the animation, as the VAT uv layer has not been modified. This is actually a fairly appropriate way to keep your vertex animation image textures small while retaining a good amount of model detail.

Obviously the position of new vertices will be somewhat quantized relative to the movement of their closest neighbor, as you would need to create the vat with full vertex amount to get per-vertex movement definitions.

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.

I have not tried this but yes, your theory about particle system should be correct- use your deforming mesh as a mesh particle, then use lifetime (which is 0-1) multiplied by your number of frames, and input to the ‘frame’ input in openVAT_standard. This could be a good case I can add to demos

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