Overview

The reason why I created this project:

The example project VertexAnimSample - Box.com that was provided by official document (Baking out vertex animation in editor with AnimToTexture) was obsolete, there're some serious issues haven't been addressed, but Epic doesn't update the example, the Editor Utility Wdiget in the origin project can't be run properly.

Content

This's an UE5 project to demonstrate VAT: Bake bone (SkeletalMesh) animation into Vertex Animation Texture, and play animation using material (the main work is running in vertex shader) of StaticMesh.

How to run

Important

Make sure plugin AnimToTexture has been enabled in your project.

1. EUW_VAT_Utils is an Editor Utility Widget bake Vertex Animation Textures automatically, credit to AnimToTextureHelpers.
   

Warning

The origin EUW_VAT_Utils only works in UE5.1, I fixed some issues to make it workable in UE5.3.

2. Create a replica from your origin assets, because the material will be interpolated by EUW_VAT_Utils automatically.
   

3. Then locate to the directory of plugin content: /AnimToTexture/Characters/Mannequin/Materials/BoneAnimation/
   

   Copy the these three nodes below.
   

   Paste into your material:
   

   Final result:
   

4. Change the material's reference of SkeletalMesh asset.
   
   

5. Right click EUW_VAT_Utils to run the widget.
   

   Setup the parameters, and click Do All.
   

   A moment later, Vertex Animation Textures have been generated.
   
   

   And the materials has been tweaked automatically.
   

   Final effect:
   

6. Because we baked multiple animation assets at once before, so we can switch animation by Material Parameter.
   
   

   
   

   How to get the animation frame length of an animation?
   check the Number of Sampled Keys of AnimSequence.