Vertex Animation Texture Addon (VAT)：Blender 材质与纹理插件

VAT Blender Addon

Live demo: https://vat.residenceprincipale.net/

This Blender plugin generates Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) from animated meshes. It is designed to simplify the export of complex animations to Three.js or other, using textures to store vertex movements.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/666ab17b-4e5b-4865-9454-8af4ba9a6aa2

Concept

The Vertex Animation Texture (VAT) technique captures the movement of an animated mesh and encodes it into textures. Each pixel in the texture represents the position of a vertex at a specific frame of the animation.

In the generated texture, the vertical axis (top to bottom) corresponds to animation frames, and the horizontal axis (left to right) corresponds to the mesh vertices.

In a real-time engine (such as Three.js), the static mesh is imported along with its animation textures. A shader reads these textures frame by frame to move the vertices, thus reproducing the original animation without the need for an armature or complex calculations on the engine side. This method allows exporting complex animations, including those from physics simulations or modifiers, while optimizing rendering performance.

Installation

• Download this repo — or grab the VAT-vX.Y.Z.zip from Releases (published automatically when a v* tag matches VAT/blender_manifest.toml). The zip must contain VAT/__init__.py + VAT/blender_manifest.toml (currently 1.0.6).
• In Blender 4.2+, go to Edit > Preferences > Add-ons.
• Click Install from Disk… and select the VAT folder (or zip).
• Enable the addon in the list.

Features

Supported Modifiers

Every mesh modifier bakes (no allowlist), but only these actually move vertices — the rest (collision, UV, weights, normals-only, caches…) bake without effect:

Names without a link have no bundled example yet (demo-threejs/public/examples.json).

Two rules:

查看官方完整介绍 ↗