So is this vertex animation tool for blender related to models for Unreal Engine 1 or rather Unreal Engine 4? If that’s so I downloaded on old unreal forums version already several months ago.
@Gamerz31w GitHub - JoshRBogart/unreal_tools: Blender 3D scripts for storing vertex data for use in a vertex shad This is the link you need. The scripts are for storing data used to animate static meshes through different methods using Unreal Engine 4 materials.
Thank you for the nice Addon!
Are there any plans to make a Blender 2.8 version?
It would be a pity to loose it in the new Blender version.
Yeah this could be great.
This tool is awesome. Thank you for making it available to the Blender community, [USER=“644194”]Josh Bogart[/USER]. I’ve submitted a pull request on Github, with fixes for the 2.8 release. That link is here for anyone who wants to give it a test run.
And here are some low quality butterfly animations I made with MeshMorpher…
Thanks for the 2.8 update. Just tried it and works just as well as the previous version.
Hi I just discovered your plugin and so far it’s amazing, you have a section with the mesh morpher and I was wondering what these options do
It was functionality from the max version I don’t remember the use of the pivot location. But it would just store it in the UV’s like a morph target. The normals option stores the 1st morph target’s normals in the objects vertex colors. It’s to aid in reducing shading artifacts.
So happy to see something like this for Blender, most appreciated!
I was wondering, would this work for exporting VATs from FLIP fluid sims as well? Similar to the Game Dev VAT export tool from Houdini.
Sorry for the late response. I’m not familiar with VATs or Houdini, but no I’m going to say probably not. The current tool works with meshes with static vertex counts. So anyway you can think of moving mesh vertices around will work, but they have to have a fixed count. You could possibly experiment with scaling parts of whole meshes down on a single frame to counter act this. Each frame could be a “flip book” mesh, but given the way the tool works it would significantly reduce your vertex and frame count accounting for the limited texture resolution.
Josh! This looks amazing… although I am lost right at the start. Where do we install these scripts?
Seeing how it’s pretty straight forward I guess it was pretty lazy of me to leave it out. You want to go to the add-on’s section of the user preferences (edit > preferences > add-on’s). You want to hit the install button and navigate to the downloaded add file in the browser that pops up. Select the add-on file and click install add-on.
2.9x version?
Pleaaaaaaaase ?
EDIT: Hey!. So i installed Blender 2.83.4 returning from 2.90, just for this.
And when I tried to install it, says: Upgrade to 2.8x required!
I just merged a 2.83 update to the master branch. If people really would like a 2.9 update it’s not going to require much I can open a new branch. I’m going to start work on the two versions of pivot painter though and upgrading the vertex animation script to it’s full functionality. I might also change the way mesh morpher works.
Hi I managed to get it installed as an add on but it won’t run
using blender 2.90.0
Heres the error
Yeah, sorry big oof there. There was a typo. I probably should write some unit tests since these are just going to get bigger.
For you to know:
I went to this page: https://github.com/JoshRBogart/unrea…s/pull/8/files
I copypasted the whole code (obviously, from the script who is named ‘vertex animation’), and paste it in .txt file. I renamed it as .py
I installed it in Blender from that file and now is working happily in 2.90
I asked this in the past and no one responded - why use this workflow instead of Alembic ?!
The vertex animation and mesh morpher scripts are for creating static meshes to be animated with a vertex shader. This way they can be used in a particle system via Cascade or Niagara. I’m assuming the memory cost of a static mesh with vertex colors and extra UV’s or some tiny textures is much cheaper than that of an alembic geometry cache. Not to mention the control you gain over the effect in Cascade or Niagara or even Blueprint using material parameters. If you needed a nice fluid/cloth simulation alembic might be the way to go. Especially since I don’t have the key frame mesh functionality working. With this functionality you could break up a fluid sim into different mesh emitters gaining lots of control over the effect.
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 :o