VAT the hell? How and why to animate characters with textures

What the talk is about

Andrii Danyleiko explains animating characters with textures (vertex animation textures) as an alternative to skeletal animation, which puts heavy load on the CPU. Vertex movement data is baked into a texture and a vertex shader on the GPU does the playback, so a scene can hold thousands of unique characters. He walks through the Unreal Engine pipeline step by step: animation from Mixamo, conversion with a script in 3ds Max, importing the textures and static mesh, a playback material, and a character class with a set of animations. In his tests, 2,000 to 4,000 characters ran with AI, navigation and collisions, and up to 8,000 without navigation; he also shows a run on a budget phone. He then covers limitations: blending, attaching items and root motion. Useful for developers of strategies, simulators and games with crowds.