Simple VAT

SimpleVAT turns skinned characters into lightweight animated meshes. It bakes every vertex position and normal of your animation clips into textures, and a URP vertex shader plays them back entirely on the GPU. The result is a plain MeshRenderer that animates with no Animator, no bones and no CPU skinning cost, so you can fill a scene with crowds, armies, flocks and background characters.

Workflow in three steps:

1. Create a VAT Animation Set and drop in any model with SkinnedMeshRenderers. Its clips are added for you; drop in more clips, models or Animator Controllers to add theirs.

2. Press Bake. The merged mesh, materials and position/normal textures are stored inside the asset, and a ready-to-use prefab is generated.

3. Drag the prefab into your scene. It plays on Awake.

It's more than a baker. The VATAnimator component gives you an Animator-like API: Play clips by name or index, cross-fade between them on the GPU, and hold phase-synced blends such as walk/run driven by a speed value. Random start times keep copies from moving in lockstep. The CPU only touches the material when the clip, blend or speed changes.

The Inspector does the bookkeeping for you. Every clip shows its frame count, length and loop mode. Before you bake it catches missing renderers, empty or duplicate clips and clips too long for the GPU's texture limit, and it shows the vertex count, frame count and texture memory the bake will use. After a bake it tells you when the source or settings have changed, lists the memory of every clip, and switches all baked materials between Lit and Unlit in one click.

A live animated preview sits right under it. Press play on any clip, pick a second clip to blend with, orbit, zoom and scrub the timeline before you drop anything in a scene.

Two URP shaders are included. Simple Lit supports main light shadows, ambient light and fog. Simple Unlit shows just the base map and color, for stylized or distant crowds. Both cast shadows, have depth and depth-normals passes for SSAO and other URP features, and work in the Forward, Forward+ and Deferred rendering paths. Want VAT in your own shader? Include VAT.hlsl and call one macro, or use the Custom Function node in Shader Graph.

Screenshots use the free Unity Starter Assets Third Person character (not included).