About EQ VAT Lab — Vertex Animation Texture Baker & Player (URP)
- Tools, Systems & Learning > Development Tools & Automation
- Art & Visuals > Textures & Materials
Turn animation into textures. Turn textures into crowds.
EQ VAT Lab bakes per-vertex animation data (positions, rotations, normals) into floating-point textures that a vertex shader samples at runtime. CPU skinning and Animator evaluation disappear; what remains is a static mesh, a couple of textures, and GPU-speed playback — the technique behind massive crowds, large-scale destruction, and replayable VFX.
Five bakers, one wizard, one click.
- Bone VAT — SkinnedMeshRenderer + AnimationClip → compact per-bone textures; linear blend skinning runs entirely on the GPU.
- Vertex VAT — the same inputs, captured as per-vertex offsets: cloth, muscle, any deformation.
- Alembic VAT — bake AlembicStreamPlayer caches (Houdini, Marvelous Designer); delta or absolute encoding chosen automatically from topology stability.
- Sprite VAT — bake Shuriken particle systems to camera-facing billboard grids with stable per-particle identity.
- VFX Graph Sprite VAT — capture VFX Graph particles through an explicit output-event bridge.
Houdini VAT 3.0 import. Point the Import Wizard at a SideFX VAT 3.0 export folder: it reads the .mat companion metadata (bounds, FPS, frame count), wires the right EQVAT URP shader — SoftBody, RigidBody, Fluid, or Particle Sprite — and plays it back with no SideFX shadergraphs required.
Built for temporal anti-aliasing. Every master shader ships a hand-authored MotionVectors pass that reconstructs deformation motion, so VAT meshes do not ghost or smear under TAA / DLSS / TSR. (One documented exception: fluid caches with changing topology write zero deformation motion by design — the manual explains why.)
Runtime control without material clones. Per-instance playback controllers drive frame, speed, loop, one-shot, clip ranges, random start frames and completion events through MaterialPropertyBlocks — a whole crowd de-syncs on one shared material. A socket tracker keeps a weapon in a baked character's hand, GPU skinning and all.
A demo that builds itself. The included scene ships empty and tiny: press Build Demo and it constructs procedural sources, bakes them with the real bakers on your machine, and places a de-synced Bone VAT crowd, a Vertex VAT banner, and a Sprite VAT fountain. No third-party art, no license baggage — you watch the tool do its actual job in your own project within a minute of import.
Honest engineering throughout. Texture validation with auto-fix (Point filter / linear / no mips / clamp), bake quality profiles with texture-memory budgets, per-bake reports, deterministic outputs to a folder outside the package so reinstalls never eat your bakes.
EQ VAT Lab bakes per-vertex animation data (positions, rotations, normals) into floating-point textures that a vertex shader samples at runtime. CPU skinning and Animator evaluation disappear; what remains is a static mesh, a couple of textures, and GPU-speed playback — the technique behind massive crowds, large-scale destruction, and replayable VFX.
Five bakers, one wizard, one click.
- Bone VAT — SkinnedMeshRenderer + AnimationClip → compact per-bone textures; linear blend skinning runs entirely on the GPU.
- Vertex VAT — the same inputs, captured as per-vertex offsets: cloth, muscle, any deformation.
- Alembic VAT — bake AlembicStreamPlayer caches (Houdini, Marvelous Designer); delta or absolute encoding chosen automatically from topology stability.
- Sprite VAT — bake Shuriken particle systems to camera-facing billboard grids with stable per-particle identity.
- VFX Graph Sprite VAT — capture VFX Graph particles through an explicit output-event bridge.
Houdini VAT 3.0 import. Point the Import Wizard at a SideFX VAT 3.0 export folder: it reads the .mat companion metadata (bounds, FPS, frame count), wires the right EQVAT URP shader — SoftBody, RigidBody, Fluid, or Particle Sprite — and plays it back with no SideFX shadergraphs required.
Built for temporal anti-aliasing. Every master shader ships a hand-authored MotionVectors pass that reconstructs deformation motion, so VAT meshes do not ghost or smear under TAA / DLSS / TSR. (One documented exception: fluid caches with changing topology write zero deformation motion by design — the manual explains why.)
Runtime control without material clones. Per-instance playback controllers drive frame, speed, loop, one-shot, clip ranges, random start frames and completion events through MaterialPropertyBlocks — a whole crowd de-syncs on one shared material. A socket tracker keeps a weapon in a baked character's hand, GPU skinning and all.
A demo that builds itself. The included scene ships empty and tiny: press Build Demo and it constructs procedural sources, bakes them with the real bakers on your machine, and places a de-synced Bone VAT crowd, a Vertex VAT banner, and a Sprite VAT fountain. No third-party art, no license baggage — you watch the tool do its actual job in your own project within a minute of import.
Honest engineering throughout. Texture validation with auto-fix (Point filter / linear / no mips / clamp), bake quality profiles with texture-memory budgets, per-bake reports, deterministic outputs to a folder outside the package so reinstalls never eat your bakes.