Vertex animation textures, beanbags and boneless animations. 

I was not expecting this to tackle Python in Blender with such a practical example. Greatly appreciated, what a complete 10mins... concepts, scripting, baking, shaders, etc.

One of the best things about VATs is that objects using the same VAT material can be batched into one draw call.

Actual topic aside, this might be the most incredible informational video I have ever seen. The information density is extremely high, yet at no point did I not understand what was going on, or feel the need to pause or rewind.

Man i just love when people appreciate the power of python in blender. Also just the fact that not having a builtin tool for something should mean game over

This is the coolest thing I've learned all week while studying asset creation for my game. You've earned a subscriber, my friend!

You're great Martin congrats!!!

i was like "i didnt know blender can do that", and it canot, but he just wrote the whole thing from scratch. nice work!

Your work is truly fascinating. I could listen to you for hours. Love how you explains in reasonable detail, but don’t go on for way too long. Also love how clear and concise you are, highlighting both what you’re covering and points of interest that we can pause the video at. I’m no programmer, but fancy dabbling with screensavers. I’m sure I’ll be utilising some of your guidance in my learning. Thank you.

Every video you post is consistently high quality, and I'm super excited to see what content you post in the future! Something tells me this will get some use in my own Godot game as well!

Amazing as always. I love the fact that you talk about like, patron, subscription at the end.

This is really cool, thanks for all your hard work creating these tutorials.

Fantastic set of videos you have made. Your visuals have helped so much in understanding these concepts.

This was fantastic, thanks so much for uploading!

That was super helpful, thank you so much.

Dude you are a wizard! xD How useful tutorials you create... each one is a gold mine...

This was an amazing tutorial on a deep topic and clearly explained. Thank you so much!

Came from WFC video, and after watching this video i can say that your channel has quality content and you earned a new subscriber ;)

Again my mind is blown. I had idea that such concept might exist but DAMN.

Wow, I’m surprisingly happy :) Very well explained and I will defiantly use it in my future Godot projects. Thanks a lot 🥰

That's actually brilliant, previously I used to use vertex colors to assign delays and randomness to various parts of the model then I apply a complex shader to do the rest of the animation... damn if I knew about this earlier, thnx for sharing

Hope you'll keep making these in the future because they're really excellent! :) Not many videos on youtube on these higher level tech art concepts.

This is absolutely insane! How does someone even arrive at this solution is incredible, thank you so much for what you do!!!!!

This was very informative! Thank you Martin!

This is an exceptional video. Thank you for making this!

This is excellent work.

This is explained so well, thanks!

Discovered you last week with the signed distance fields video. I just finished by BSc in Computer Science and took intro to graphics 1 and 2 this year. Very cool content; love having more tools in my toolbox. I'm a Patron now!

Happy to have found your video. Best of luck!

Great tutorial as usual!

This is one of my favourite channels Not kidding!

Thank you! Made it to work for my use case, would not have made it if you didn't show any code. But here are some suggestions: - In bpy.data.images.new(), pass "is_data=True" otherwise the pixels gets affected by colorspace. To export in 16bits per channel, pass "float_buffer=True" and set color_depth in scene.render.image_settings to 16. Saving to OPEN_EXR format works best for me, blender seems to save them in float instead of rounding to ints if you choose that format. - Instead of saving vertex positions, saving delta positions might increase accuracy. In UVMap2, the V component can be used to store your "scale" value (maximum distance moved by that vertex). With this, you dont have to pass scale values to the shader anymore. To further improve on this, each vertex can have different scale values to increase accuracy per vertex. - You can further remove texture_width and num_frames from the shader by adjusting the U in the UVMap2 and calculating "frame" adjusted to num_frames before passing them to the shader.

Thank you for making these videos

This is so helpful thank you! I think when I implement it I will bake the -y,z transformation into the texture instead of doing it in the shader.

I'm not a game dev, I only know basic programming so pretty much all of the info here completely blew over my head. still very interesting, such a great video!

This is super interesting, thank you! Didn't know this was a thing

Golden channel 🌟

Your channel is gold dust for an algorithm lover hehe

Excellent video!

Amazing, great content.

Holy sh*t! Thanks so much! Absolutely awesome!

Fantastic!

That's awesome! New technique to me. If you want to make the shader texture size agnostic, you can get the texture dimensions inside the shader itself using the ivec2 texSize = textureSize(texture, miplevel); function, where miplevel in this case would always be 0.

Thank you so much.

i will have to figure this out later but thats nuts

Спасибо большое за видео.

Crazy! I'm looking for flow maps and find your channel and in my mind I was, ok, ill have to translate it to glsl for godot, now I have a channel with advanced techniques directly in godot! Thanks. I'm learning godot and shaders to use it as a creative coding framework and I'm thinking the crazy s*** i can do with procedural vertex animations in this way instead of a simple vertex animation.

I needed that a couple of days ago, with blender and unity. I definitely need to learn python... Thanks for sharing, super useful!

The value per second of this video is out of control.

Martin where are you, your videos are absolute gold mine! I just tinkered a lot with the wave function one and got it working on Godot4, pls tell me you moved to another platform and I just need to find it T_T

good stuff

This was neato

I initially heard "per vertex" as "pervert ex"'. My brain is broken.

digging through game files, i always wondered what these textures were for, but didn't even know where to begin googling them.

This is such a great content! How did you learn all this?

Coolest shet i ever seen how did ye get so gud at life?

Sheesh i didn't use that before which is SAD omg helpful lol

Is there a way to use this with multiple objects? like to achieve a demolition VAT using fractured objects, at the moment the plug in only allows a single object to be selected, wich means every piece of debris would have a separate VAT, and I'm looking for a way to have a single texture for the hole effect

this is amazing. have you ever worked with meta spark? if so, how would you integrate this into sparkSL? thanks in advance.

Nice tuto, what is purpose of tangents though? aren't pos + norm is enough for a triangle/quad mesh to be animated accuratly?

Any advice for someone who's verts indices are all screwed up when I go into Godot? I think I have a decent export of the textures, my animation in Godot looks correct when I scrub through the frames, except all the triangles are incorrect, its as though my vertex positions are all correct, but the order of the vertex indices are incorrect. My guess is this must be an error in my export somewhere. By the way, your videos are really unique and fantastic. Always excited for a new video. :)

Awesome work, are those code snippets available anywhere?

The same set of vertices with different sets of positions reminds me of the blend shape concept, with an array of shapes made from each frame state, with blending of 2 elements each time sequentially over time. Probably too many states ;) I wonder if there's any standard in baking simulation data, in Houdini you can export in a vdb format but i don't know if it's more for particle systems. Maybe it could be possible to use the blend shapes to have the raw data in Godot and then make an addin to bake from the editor what you want with a script (with helper functions that make the work of compressing/decompressing spatial data).

Awesome video, greatly appreciated! :) One question: Why is "texture_width = 128"? Should this not be equal to the number of animated vertices? I looked at the project file and your page seems to have only 102 vertices.

very cool! seems very useful. I have some question however : can it work with a rigged mesh (using bone animation+ vertex animation maps)? what are the limits of the map? how many vertex can it control, and how long is the animation possible?

Can I get uhh boneless animation with 2L of coke

Tried this in Unity. So close - there is always a slight offset which throws everything off. ***edit*** - use exr as mentioned in other comments. The error was precision - of course the textures end up quite a bit larger...

precalculations got it

did you share blender script ? I could not see.

How performant is it compared with for example alrmbic cache ?

Just out of curiosity, what would be the difference between vertex animation textures and using alembic files, I can't quite remember but I think alembic files are animated vertices right?

Now teach us how to emulate the wobbly vertex animations that are _the_ iconic style of the Quake 2 engine :D Technically, I think Quake 1 also has this "feature", but the textures were so low-res and there was no fancy-schmancy "model interpolation" bullshit to pamper us with "animations that don't look like 2 FPS stop-motion" so nobody could tell that the textures were getting warped between each frame of animation. I know that some of the source ports added this in and caused some... interested effects (especially to the weapon firing animations). But even in vanilla Quake 1 without interpolation modded in, I think that you could see the model warping happening on the weapons as they bobbed up and down while running. Only when using the OpenGL, DirectX (Or, D3D, I suppose), and Glide renderers, though. I'm sure that on a technical level, the same thing is happening in the software renderer, but, frankly, if you're running in software mode then you're dealing with much bigger graphical degradation issues than a little bit of wobble in the edges lol.

you can use sampler2D in a vertex shader in GLSL3.3? well one learns something new everyday i guess cheers!

I've been using vertex animation for my Quake 1,2,3 models for years...

Maybe the resolution of the animation yould be improved a bit by saving not the absolute position/tangent/normal but the change to the previous frame in the texture.

I try to do this with UE4. Are you gonna release this addon? Is it available on your Patreon?

I was trying to follow through your video but when applying the shader, the mesh becomes invisible no matter what I do. What would be the problem? Also, if you could 'remake' this video/ or a part 2 with more in depth info that would be very much appreciated. There's just a lot of info in such a short time.

Wouldn't it be better to use lossless compression than uncompressed?

A vertex isn't likely to get too far from its adjacent vertices, nor from the position it was at on the previous frame. I wonder if you could have more detailed animations with less data by storing differences from the previous frame or a specific adjacent vertex in really thin data types. Maybe have some k-frames to deal with zeroing.

Is the script downloadable anywhere?

This is super cool.. I ended up here after trying to figure out similar approach to going from C4D to SparkAR... Would anyone happen to know if this python code would also work in C4D?

I get the feeling you have done a lot of transferring between blender and godot.

Are images really more performance friendly than arrays?

Cant blender now write arbitrary information per vertex using geometry nodes? Thats got to make encoding this sort of data so much easier.

🅱oneless animation

where is blender script link

i need this for a godot project im doing for a spring pad but its 4 am and im way too lazy to type out all this code rn and no im not buying your Patreon

Why not use blendshapes instead.

could you not just use shape keys?

Now you can go with houdini without coding.

This is an interesting way to go about it, but you can also just simply bake physics animation with blender where blender keyframes the changes in the mesh and is included in the metadata of the model as long as its exported as an FBX. Most of blenders physics modifiers have a bake or catch tab for this reason.

Gosh i hate python so much, thanks for the infos though

SUBUSCIRIBESD

I think it's time to revise this tutorial from blender to Unreal Engine while Houdini wiping up all industry.

why the fuck would you need to do that ? why not using shape keys ?

great stuff! started playing with it! I did have to change the blender script somewhat to get it to work with blender 3.x though: MD_MorphTexture.py This makes sure that the proper object is exported (didn't work OOTB IDK maybe something changed in blender) and also that the object is exported as FBX, because the GLTF/GLB export (for some blender reason) changed the UVMap name. Enjoy. def export_mesh(obj, output_dir, name): if obj.name not in bpy.context.view_layer.objects: bpy.context.view_layer.active_layer_collection.collection.objects.link(obj) bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='DESELECT') obj.select_set(True) bpy.context.view_layer.objects.active = obj output_dir = output_dir + name + "_" + "mesh.fbx" bpy.ops.export_scene.fbx(filepath=output_dir, use_selection=True)