Gallery
Sample asset playing a baked animation (still frame).
Lit vertex animation shader built in Shader Graph.
Artist-facing model baker.
About this resource
TAO Vertex Animation bakes skinned-mesh animations into textures so the GPU can play them back. This lets you render tens of thousands of animated characters, each with its own animation state, without skinned mesh renderers.
Features
Model baker
- Stores multiple animations in one
Texture2DArray - Generates LODs, prefabs and animation books
Shaders
- Lit vertex animation shader built in Shader Graph, with full sub-graph support
- Interpolation between frames
- Normal encoding and decoding
DOTS animation system
- A small API around animation libraries and books
- Sample systems for playing animations and spawning many characters
Status
The project was built by the Tech Art Outsource group at Breda University of Applied Sciences and last updated in 2021. Its DOTS layer targets the early preview Entities packages. The baker and the Shader Graph playback are still a useful reference for building VAT pipelines today. The creators list ideas for improvement in the README, such as per-bone animation and a separate rotation map.
Installation
Install it as a package from the git URL in the Package Manager (https://github.com/maxartz15/VertexAnimation.git). Samples are importable from the package page.
