Anim to Texture in 5.4

Development Character & Animation
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I originally followed this tutorial on YouTube and got Anim To Texture working for a crowd of people in 5.2

but after updating the project to 5.4, importing the same vertex animated static mesh assets doesnt animate within the texture like before. Additionally the Editor Utility Widget hasnt been updated for the new version of the editor so I cant even use it to create a new version of the vertex animated static meshes.

I’ve been exploring other options and landed on the following walkthrough that has more high level instructions on how to generate vertex animations manually without the Editor Utility Widget.

But this is more of a blog post explaining the methodology and not a tutorial, so it leaves out a lot of crucial steps and Im not able to replicate the results.

Has anyone figured out how to set up vertex animated static meshes in 5.4? Anyone have a more comprehensive breakdown of the workflow?

Thanks!

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This Animation Textures and using the AnimToTexture plugin | unrealcode.net is a draft of an article I am writing about using the AnimToTexture plugin - any feedback would be appreciated

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200-3513694876
MY MAN!

That worked like a charm! Thank you so much!

And just to return the favor here is some feedback for your tutorial:

right off the bat, his tutorial is SUPER comprehensive, way clearer than anything else online so thank you for that.

I mostly only have nitpicks but I hope it helps:

needs more pictures

I would recommend mentioning upfront that this is an intermediate level tutorial and not for beginners.

We want to change this property but not yet. If you just tick it the M_ATMannequin node will be deleted from the material graph. Don’t do this yet.
almost jumped the gun on this one. a little more warning please :wink:

Add the nodes and connections shown in the this picture:
kinda hard to see in the picture. would be nice if there was a text list with it

When you add the GetMaterialAttributes nodes in order to get pins on the node you will need to edit its details and add elements to the “Attribute Get Types” property.
got stuck here for a minute because I didnt want to read ahead. maybe this should be bold and red text or something

When you add the SetMaterialAttributes node in order to get pins on the node you will need to edit its details and add elements to the “Attribute Get Types” property:
I think this is using the wrong image

Note that we added the crucial MaterialAttributeLayers node. Set the properties of this node like so:
this didnt appear in the dropdown for the layer asset and I had to go looking for it. Might be worth mentioning

Save everything before doing this step.
I would make this more noticable

Check the Output Log window. If an error occurs this will be logged, there will not be any sort of popup alert. For example of one of the animations specified in the data asset does not have the same skeletal mesh as the specified static mesh you will see a warning like this:
LogAnimToTextureEditor: Warning: Invalid AnimSequence: run_fwd for given SkeletalMesh: SKM_Manny_Simple
I would put this in a separate “troubleshooting” section further down

If you open the static mesh you should see it executing the first animation:
It would be a nice touch if this was an animated gif :wink:

I occasionally would lose my place and accidentally skip parts. Might be helpful to have the occasional image saying “your folder should look like this” or something so its easier to tell when I missed something

Keep doing the lords work!

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Thanks very much for the feedback, I should have an updated version out tomorrow.

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