I have been developing an open source solution for exporting Vertex Animation Textures from Blender to game engines- and have just released a workflow video for usage in Unreal 5. This workflow allows for complex animation, like baked simulations, animated geometry nodes, and any vertex-driven animation to play in-engine using simple shader WPO.
One limitation in Unreal at the moment is this is not done via custom Vertex Factory, so Forward Shading must be used.
I’m getting some pretty cool results by using this method and wanted to share to the community and fellow Blender > Unreal artists and animators.
I’m excited to get this working across all shading pipelines and release plan to some templates at that point for more complex behavior for driving OpenVAT animation more flexibly with compute shaders.
Check out the intro to using OpenVAT in Unreal here, and take a look at my other videos and the GitHub for more information on the project!
Blender to Unreal VAT Pipeline – Real-Time Mesh Animation with OpenVAT
