Free Blender Add-On With Pro Game Dev Tools Released By Ghislain Girardot

As Ghislain Girardot, renowned for his fantastic Unreal Engine 5 tutorials, noted, this powerful toolset may have come a bit late, as most workflows are now moving toward virtualized geometry and VSM approaches that aren't particularly compatible with vertex offsets. Still, it was something he was passionate about creating, and he dedicated significant time to it, releasing a 150-page manual and over two hours of video tutorials.

Game Tools is a completely free and open-source add-on that brings together several professional-grade techniques commonly used in the video game industry. It includes:

• Vertex Animation Textures, a tool that allows you to bake animation data, per vertex, into textures;
• Object Animation Textures, a tool that allows you to bake animation data, per object, into textures;
• Bone Animation Textures, a tool that allows you to bake animation data, per bone, into textures;
• Object Attributes Textures, a tool that allows you to bake data, per object, into textures. Previously known as Pivot Painter 2.0, it has been rebranded due to improvements that offer better flexibility and potentially open the door to new workflows;
• Signed Distance Fields, a tool that allows you to bake signed distance fields;
• Data Baker, a tool that allows you to bake various types of data into UVs, Vertex Colors, or Normals, offering flexibility and advanced bit-packing techniques;
• FFT Ocean Baker, a tool that streamlines the process of baking Blender's FFT-based ocean modifier into a set of tiling, looping textures containing displacement offsets, normals, and peaks. This one is still in development and not yet publicly available.

You can find the YouTube tutorial playlist here and explore the extensive Technical Art Compendium, which offers in-depth information and context for all the tools and techniques included in the add-on.

Game Tools can be installed directly through Blender's official Extensions system. You're also welcome to contribute to its development or report bugs on GitHub.

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