So in the CitySample project I noticed that the background characters in crowds are static meshes with vertex animation in the materials. There is a plugin there called AnimToTexture which seems like it can bake vertex animation from a given data asset- Though I’m struggling to figure it out, has anyone tried AnimToTexture?
I’m trying to apply it to a different character mesh, using SK_BASE skeleton (the metahuman skeleton).
Check this out, I think they based it on this.
This is a handy resource, so thanks for linking it!
The process in generating the VATs seems to be a little different with the UE5 AnimToTexture.
I’d give this Vertex_Anim_Toolset a go but it seems to be discontinued since 4.26.0…
So… the question remains- How to use the AnimToTexture plugin?
You can use it in 4.26 to generate the textures and static meshes.
Then there is a UE5 Pull request on the github with a UE5 compatible version, from there you can use the material functions in UE5 to playback the VAT animations.
Only thing that doesn’t work on UE5 is the c++ class that generates them which is unfortunate, but it’s totally doable, just generate in a separate 4.26 project and migrate to UE5.
Right, But the material functions aren’t showing up with the plugin installed to 5.0.1 (ExtractAnimData_Pivot_Interp).
*edit
Ah nvm, I can drag the functions over from the folder, it’s just searching for them that doesn’t work.
Have you figured out how to use it?
And about that Vertext toolset, how do you get it to work in UE5? I downloaded the pull request but I do not see the button to bake animation
As Lazanja said, It works to bake the mesh and textures in 4.26 and migrate over to ue5. Baking in ue5 doesn’t work yet… Though I guess you would have figured that out by now 
has anybody converted this vertex anim plugin to ue5 with success?
I did it after upgrading to 4.27, but have had no time to test it yet… there had been a lot of work with float to double and some other vector conversion…
btw its creator suggests to use the very similar AnimToTexture plugin made by Epic from the CitySample project. is it handy too, or is there docs somewhere?
I found a nice tutorial on the AnimToTexture plugin that comes in the CitySample and it helped me tremendously.
Here is a link to the original post in Japanese:
Here is the link to the version I translated by using DeepL Translator.
You can also accomplish a similar effect not needing to render animations to textures by following this tutorial and using blender to bake your animation composite
I made a video on how to use the AnimToTexture plugin, which is now included in 5.1. It was a bit of a puzzle to figure out and I didn’t solve it all.
There are some functions in the plugin I couldn’t get working, but the video shows a working example. The video shows two blueprints, one is an editor utility widget and the other is a basic instancing setup and those blueprints are on my github, just as UASSETS for 5.1 (is there a better way to share an editor utility?)
Please note, the video shows I’m getting steppy motion, which I have not yet solved. If you know what is causing this, please let me know!
