Free Tool For Baking Vertex Animation Textures Directly In Unity

Created by Ankoku, who previously shared a breakdown of making a cinematic trailer with motion capture on an iPhone and a Unity-made scene from Spirited Away, this tool is currently focused on working with SkinnedMeshRenderer components, mainly for characters. The developer mentioned that there are still areas for improvement, such as enhancing automation in the baking process and optimizing data packing, which may be addressed in future updates.

Key Unity VAT Baker features include:

• Prefab validation checks and helpful warnings;
• Ability to gather all animation clips from the Animator Controller into a list;
• Prefab preview with a selected animation clip;
• Adjustable frame step (to reduce frame count and texture size with minimal quality loss);
• No vertex count limit (the tool uses multiple rows per frame);
• Option to bake positions and normals
• Two Shader Graph subgraphs included: VAT_Simple, which uses 2 texture samplers, and VAT_WithFrameBlend, which uses 4 texture samplers and simple blending logic;
• Example scene included for: Comparing FrameStep and Blend modes and performance testing with 1000+ Animator Controllers vs. GPU instancing using VAT.

This tool is free to use in your projects, including commercial ones. You are also welcome to modify and enhance it as you see fit.

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