EQ VAT Lab — Vertex Animation Texture Baker & Player (URP)

Documentation page

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.

• textures; linear blend skinning runs entirely on the GPU.Bone VAT — SkinnedMeshRenderer + AnimationClip → compact per-bone
  
• muscle, any deformation.Vertex VAT — the same inputs, captured as per-vertex offsets: cloth,
  
• stability.Alembic VAT — bake AlembicStreamPlayer caches (Houdini, Marvelous
  Designer); delta or absolute encoding chosen automatically from topology
  
• grids with stable per-particle identity.Sprite VAT — bake Shuriken particle systems to camera-facing billboard
  
• output-event bridge.VFX Graph Sprite VAT — capture VFX Graph particles through an explicit
  

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.