Vertex Animation Script for Blender 3D Users

[Josh Bogart]

I see.. What about baked sim effects like tower/bridge crumbling down or something exploding into pieces ? Would Alembic be a better choice for this kind of stuff ?

I am mostly concerned with performance on Android (Oculus Quest in particular) and ease of setting it all up. I don't really need high fidelity control over parameters and I am definitely not materials/shaders guru

No I would not use this method and this method alone to achieve an effect like you're describing. I'm assuming this sort of effect would be some what complex. I would say it all really depends on the desired scale, style, and fidelity of the effect, as well as the role of the effect in your project.

[ash_versatile]

I have a cube that animates a short distance along the y-axis, nothing complex. The normals have 8 colors (one for each vertex I assume). The animation works, but the shading is clearly wrong. Perhaps I missed a step? I think I have all the proper settings applied to the normal texture.

[Josh Bogart]

I have a cube that animates a short distance along the y-axis, nothing complex. The normals have 8 colors (one for each vertex I assume). The animation works, but the shading is clearly wrong. Perhaps I missed a step? I think I have all the proper settings applied to the normal texture.

Make sure you have un-checked the "Tangent Space Normal" option in your materials' details panel. Also did you export and import normals from blender with the mesh and if so what options did you choose. https://docs.unrealengine.com/Images...n_Normals.webp

[sam hains]

hey! thanks a lot for this plugin, i am about to use this to create a butterfly effect for unreal, and i noticed that you advised we use mesh morpher. although i cannot figure out how we are supposed to use mesh morpher? Am i missing the documentation for this somwhere? how is it intended to be used?

Thanks again, I will proceed for now with vertex animations

[sam hains]

Hmm, something didnt work out for me. I thought I followed the steps very closely. No animations happening in unreal.


I suspect it might be something to do with my unreal config, which I'm going to keep working on but does this look right for the images generated by the plugin? I noticed that for some reason I did not get a "morphs" texture, but rather mine was called "offsets" - is that the same thing? its a vertex animation for an extremely simple 12 frame butterfly flapping animation.

[Josh Bogart]

Hmm, something didnt work out for me. I thought I followed the steps very closely. No animations happening in unreal.


I suspect it might be something to do with my unreal config, which I'm going to keep working on but does this look right for the images generated by the plugin? I noticed that for some reason I did not get a "morphs" texture, but rather mine was called "offsets" - is that the same thing? its a vertex animation for an extremely simple 12 frame butterfly flapping animation.

Yes, I changed the named of the generated texture to offsets I thought it was more on the nose. The textures look right. It looks like you're mesh has 10 vertices. Are you using the generated export mesh? The UVs in the images are not from the generated UV channel I can tell that at least. I would really need some screen shots of your mesh settings in Unreal and of your material setup.

[Arkiras]

Josh Bogart I know this is a big thing to ask but is there any chance you'll consider porting the StaticMeshSkeletalAnimation (in Engine\Extras\3dsMaxScripts) maxscript? Jonathan Lindquist mentioned it was used for the beetles in the UE5 demo and the material side implementation is available in the Niagara content examples. I couldn't find any documentation on it but from his description it seems to be able to more efficiently store data.

https://vimeo.com/266582237
It's 2 pixels per captured bone frame. One pixel for rotation and another for position. So the system can drive high res models without incurring high memory costs.

Regardless, thank you for taking the time to port the VertexAnimationTools script for us. Very grateful for that.

[Doublezer0]

Josh Bogart I know this is a big thing to ask but is there any chance you'll consider porting the StaticMeshSkeletalAnimation (in Engine\Extras\3dsMaxScripts) maxscript? Jonathan Lindquist mentioned it was used for the beetles in the UE5 demo and the material side implementation is available in the Niagara content examples. I couldn't find any documentation on it but from his description it seems to be able to more efficiently store data.



Regardless, thank you for taking the time to port the VertexAnimationTools script for us. Very grateful for that.

Rather interested in this myself now. I'm also curious as to how I can leverage UDIMs for this. I was advised Sub-UV might be a better option but if this 3dsm plugin is anything to go by, it might be what I am looking for.

[ZlotyGames]

This is amazing! I have a question, does the shader that handle the world position offset of the animation have any frame step interpolation? I mean the way Skeletal Animations have, where there is a blending between one frame and the other, and it works perfectly in situations where the display framerate is higher than of the animation (mainly in slow motion and higher monitor refresh rates)