Hey, I’m Luke (aka sharpened) and I’ve developed OpenVAT - a vertex animation texture toolkit with integrations for major engines. I recently have been overhauling my Unity URP implementation and wanted to share here for anyone interested. OpenVAT is completely free and open source and has been a passion project of mine over the past year and has gained some traction with multiple features by 80.lv and various creators using Unreal and Godot. My main engine focus however is Unity, and I’m excited to be releasing this deeper Unity integration. I created this to be able to export simulations and geometry node animation into engine via shader vertex offset methods.
[OpenVAT] Blender to Unity VAT Workflow - Gameplay Control
With this latest Unity update, I now have a framework for a VAT controller system (which retains GPU batching) and allows for easy animation control and triggering per object. This workflow has continued to amaze me as I develop, recently even successfully encoding fluid simulations in a simple texture (friendly for mobile, web, ar, vr and any platform, while being about 5% the memory overhead of alembic, and negligible impact on CPU and GPU).
This new integration also features smooth frame blending, improvement to auto-setup, and a lot of work behind the scenes to make this modular, streamlined and set up for future expansion.
Check out openvat.org for more technical information and stay tuned for more written documentation and examples for the new Unity integration.
OpenVAT enables animation workflows that are otherwise impossible to export — bringing procedural and simulated effects into game engines that would normally require complex in-engine setups or be outright unsupported by formats like FBX or Alembic.