A Complete Guide on SIdeFX's Vertex Animation Textures Tool

In case you missed it, Vertex Animation Textures 3.0 is part of the open-source toolset in Houdini called SideFXLabs. Vertex Animation Textures is an efficient and powerful solution to recreate complex and non-traditional animations in real-time. Because VAT only uses textures and shaders to achieve the visuals on the GPU, it has a much lighter performance impact on the CPU, compared to traditional skeletal mesh animations. Compared to previous versions, VAT 3.0 offers more streamlined workflows, additional advanced features, and a lot more customizability.

The SideFx Labs team has released 2 great and in-depth tutorials on using VAT. The first one showcases the possibilities of the VAT tool and demonstrates its RBD interpolation techniques, fluid UVs, tangent-space normal support, texture memory reduction, streamlined workflows, up to 9 channels of custom data, and a lot of extendability.

The second guide covers VAT's Soft-Body Deformation mode. The mode can work with metal, cloth, paper, plastic, vegetation, hair, characters, crowds, etc. Soft-Body Deformation mode supports LODs and works with both Unreal Engine and Unity, requiring only a single FBX file, a single material, and a single set of textures.

You can access Part 1 of the guide here and Part 2 here. Also, don't forget to join our new Reddit page, our new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.