Getting vertex data after animation is applied?

Unity Engine
1

I was looking at how hard it’d be to implement good motion blur on characters, and found this paper:
http://research.cs.tamu.edu/keyser/Papers/JonesThesis.pdf

On page 45 there are some screenshots that basically sum up the algorithm. To pull this off, I’d need to access the positions of the vertices of a skinned mesh after the animation is applied. Using the Mesh interface in LateUpdate(), this doesn’t seem to work.

Am I missing something, or is it an unimplemented feature/bug?

Thanks,
-Jon

2

You can’t read skinned vertices back on the CPU because they are never written into a readable area. For performance reasons, the vertices are skinned directly into the dynamic write-only vertex buffer (i.e. to the memory where GPU has a fast read access… but the CPU has super-slow read access).

Thus the data of the skinned mesh (vertices, normals, …) is always the source data, not the skinned result.

Edit: maybe you can use some GPU based approach instead? E.g. Motion Blur using Geometry and Shading Distortion (pdf on ATI site)?