Maya to Unreal - Vertex Animated Textures Baker Script
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Struggled to find a nice easy to use Maya to Unreal Vertex Animated Texture tool, so I ended up making my own. Thought I'd share with the community here, so that anyone can use/improve it further for their own uses.
It produces a both a normal map (World Space) and position map (local space - position map relative to the frame 0). The details for the math to turn the positions and XYZ to RGB are all written down in the read me so you can use this tool and recreate the shaders in any other program other than Unreal too.
A demo UE shader is provided in the GIT.
I found there is some limitations in regard to the vertex position based of objects local space, and having more then 2000 vertices significantly increase the risk of my VAT solution not working properly in engine.
I've written out some of the limitations in the document and some of the workarounds I did, so you don't have to trial and error your way to a working result.
1-min quick explanation of what Vertex Animated Textures are:
https://youtu.be/kuKEY0qqS6Q
Git Page:
GitHub - Maya to UE - Vertex Animation Texture
Always turn off SRGB in UE! And might be worth turning off texture compression if you find it causing issues.
8bit per channel and 16bit per channel modes for position, step count for optimisation if you have longer animations. There is also a split mode which works but higher chance of breaking.
It produces a both a normal map (World Space) and position map (local space - position map relative to the frame 0). The details for the math to turn the positions and XYZ to RGB are all written down in the read me so you can use this tool and recreate the shaders in any other program other than Unreal too.
A demo UE shader is provided in the GIT.
I found there is some limitations in regard to the vertex position based of objects local space, and having more then 2000 vertices significantly increase the risk of my VAT solution not working properly in engine.
I've written out some of the limitations in the document and some of the workarounds I did, so you don't have to trial and error your way to a working result.
1-min quick explanation of what Vertex Animated Textures are:
https://youtu.be/kuKEY0qqS6Q
Git Page:
GitHub - Maya to UE - Vertex Animation Texture
Always turn off SRGB in UE! And might be worth turning off texture compression if you find it causing issues.
8bit per channel and 16bit per channel modes for position, step count for optimisation if you have longer animations. There is also a split mode which works but higher chance of breaking.
Replies
We did a lot with this technique for a couple Unity games a few years ago, to greatly improve perf, especially for vfx. Big wins.