Hi, I think there are no tools related to vertex animation textures (correct me if I am wrong).
What do you think about adding dedicated node/mode to mesh output context, it would allow to set VAT and related options like speed, number of frames and other stuff.
Even better if there was also shader graph subgraph specialized just for this task, so we can create custom shaders based on vertex animation.
In addition to that, it would be amazing if there was built-in way to generate such a texture based on FBX animation (or unity animation on scene).
Yeah sure, we could try to bake them in external software, or I could write my own tool inside unity, but it would be cool if we had full toolset inside unity editor supported by editor itself.
I think I misremembered or it is down now. There are many examples on github.
When I have time I also might look into making an asset for it to have a single VAT node that plugs into the vertex position input
Well, I found at lest 2-3 quite promising repos related to baking, creating shader is not that hard, also custom tool too, but not everybody can do that, so it would be great addition to toolset like SDF baker.
I think that it’s interesting and can have potential. Currently, this can be achieved by creating a Master Shader Graph with the different settings exposed as propertys (speed, Frames Numbers, VAT type soft/rigid/Fluids etc.).
Now, as we can’t have property that show/hide based on Boolean, the VFX Output interface could quickly get overwhelming.
Now, eventually, it’s all about the encoded data, as in can be set up in numerous ways. It’s challenging to provide a built-in output or Shader, without also providing the tool to bake the data.
Sadly, I’m not aware of any internal Built-in solution to bake such texture. On my end, I usually use Houdini labs tool and custom shaders. I’ll ask our PM to add a Card in the product board to see the interest regarding this.
Again, thanks for sharing your feedback and perspective.
Hi
If you’re looking to use Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) with the VFX Graph in Unity, as also mentioned here the SideFX Labs VAT template for Unity includes a Master Shader graph that you can use in VFX graph. However, creating the VAT textures requires Houdini, more info here: Vertex Animation Textures in Unity | SideFX.
Alternatively, you can a bone-based baking solution that encodes bone animation data into textures instead of doing it for every vertex. I have a repository that has both C# script for generating the textures, the corresponding Shader Graph, and a sample scene using VFX Graph: GitHub - mbmtrex/Bone-Animation-Texture-BAT.
This approach is more optimized than VAT in terms of texture size but is limited to animations with bones. For boneless animations, there is a workaround mentioned in the repository’s README, though it is less straightforward.
Great tool! The only thing I think that’s missing on the page is that VAT often is used because skinning is too expensive and causing additional draw calls. It sounds like BAT will perform a lot worse than VAT