The VAT Man

VAT is Vertex Animation Textures.

The VAT Man™ bakes all kinds of animations, simulations, particles, and more so you can play them back with nothing more than a material.

It uses vertex displacement textures and is so lightweight and efficient that it can be exported and used in game engines like Unity, and Godot. Support for Unreal Engine is coming soon.

Previously, you needed Houdini or expensive plugins for Unreal Engine in order to create VATs but now you can make them without ever leaving Blender.

Simply select the animated objects you want to bake, set the frame range, and click Bake!

The VAT Man will create a new object combining all selected objects and create new copies of their materials enhanced with the VAT Man node and ready to play your baked animations in Cycles.

Features:

• VAT baking and playback.
• Bake to new object.
• Morph to existing object.
• Merge VAT objects into one.
• Automated animation creation and management.
• Material settings per animation.
• UV map combiner.
• Texture atlas creator.

Bake your rigged characters, physics simulations, cloth and softbodies, particles, dynamic paint, and any kind of animation you can create in Blender.

The VAT Man can Bake more than 10,000,000 points to VAT textures. Points are calculated as vertices * frames so this gives you lots of headroom for longer animations and for dense, complex meshes.

To Morph a VAT animation onto an existing mesh, the target and source meshes must have identical mesh data. They can be different in shape and size but must have matching vertex counts and polygon arrangements.

When Merging VAT objects into one, the meshes must be identical in shape and size and have identical mesh data.

When Exporting VAT Man objects and materials for use in Unity or Godot, the VAT UV map must be the second map in the list. For this purpose, The VAT Man has built-in tools for transferring UV coordinates for selected vertices from one UV map to another so you can have one "master" UV map as the first map, and the VAT UVs as the second.

For a comprehensive and in-depth exploration of the features offered by The VAT Man, check out the tutorials playlist on YouTube.

Unity and Godot

The VAT Man animation systems for Unity and Godot feature simple and easy-to-use functions to control playback of VAT animations;

PlayAnimation( index, play_from_start, freeze, _loops )

• index is an integer value representing the animation to be played.
• play_from_start is a boolean for choosing whether or not the animation should start from its first frame or pick up from its current relative frame.
• freeze is a boolean which dictates whether or not the animation should be playing or paused upon selection.
• loops sets how many times the animation should repeat before stopping. A value of 0 sets "infinite" repetitions.

PauseAnimation()

Freezes the animation at its current frame.

UnpauseAnimation()

Starts the animation playing again from its current frame.