Vertex Animator

WebGL Demo | Windows Demo | Online Documentation | Get Started Video

Supports URP and HDRP and any build platform!

Supports all Unity versions starting from 2022.3.

Improve your crowd performance up to x10!

Vertex Animator bakes skinned clips into a texture and plays them on the GPU. Identical characters draw with instancing, so a crowd no longer needs a live Animator on every copy. Use it for armies, ambient NPCs, and any scene where many characters share the same clips and the default Unity's Animator is a bottleneck.

Vertex Animator uses ordinary meshes, textures, and instancing, with no platform-specific graphics API, which allows it to run everywhere Unity does, including WebGL.

It was originally developed for an own mobile WebGL game, so it was battle-tested and refined on a real project.

Try these WebGL and Windows Demo to see it in action!

Tested on Windows, WebGL, and Android. iOS and consoles are untested, but nothing in the runtime is tied to one operating system.

On Windows (Ryzen 9 5900X, RTX 2080, 2560×1440) the same crowd averaged about 287% higher frame rate than Unity Animator: 1 000 characters at about 510 fps versus 155, and 10 000 at about 43 fps versus 11. The WebGL demo on a rather old Redmi Note 10 Pro renders 4 000 characters at 30 fps.

Main features:

• Tool for baking clips into textures.
• Four-direction locomotion support, one-shots, and loops, driven by triggers and optional crossfades.
• Timeline window for previewing the baked animations.
• Animation events.
• Attachment slots for weapons and props, drawn with the same instancing path.
• Distance LODs, with coarser meshes and slower updates far away.
• Batching the same type of characters into a single batch,
• Frustum culling
• Optimized classic Light Probes support, APV and Probe Volumes in HDRP.
• Shader Graph and Amplify Shader Editor samples.
• Per-instance custom data for customizing characters in a single batch.
• Manual update option for a greater controll (usefull for multiplayer projects).

Limitations:

Vertex Animator plays baked vertex poses. It is the wrong tool when a character needs runtime IK, ragdoll, Avatar Mask or other procedural things that involve modifying the skeleton at runtime.