1 · Pick an animation
Point the baker at an Animation Sequence, Composite, or Montage on your skeletal mesh.
Unreal Engine 5 · Rendering
Vertex Animation Toolkit
Bake Vertex Animation Textures from skeletal meshes and play them back on instanced static meshes — rendering thousands of animated characters without the cost of per-instance skeletal animation.
Unreal Engine 5
VAT baking
ISM & HISM
Multiple LODs
Showcase
See it in action
Watch the Vertex Animation Toolkit bake skeletal animation into textures and play it back across a crowd of instanced meshes.
Why VAT
Skeletal animation doesn't scale. Textures do.
Rendering a large number of animated characters with traditional skeletal meshes gets expensive fast — every instance pays for its own bone evaluation on the CPU. That's the wall you hit when you try to fill a battlefield, a stadium, or an RTS army.
Vertex Animation Textures flip the problem. The Vertex Animation Toolkit bakes your skeletal animation into a texture, then plays it back entirely in the material on the GPU. Combined with Instanced and Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes, that means you can draw thousands of animated meshes in a single draw path — no per-instance skeletal overhead.
It's the same technique AAA studios use for crowds and hordes, packaged as a documented, drop-in Unreal Engine 5 plugin with the baking tools, materials, and runtime helpers already built for you.
Features
Everything you need to ship VAT
From baking to runtime playback, the toolkit covers the full pipeline so you can focus on your game instead of the plumbing.
Bake from any animation
Generate Vertex Animation Textures directly from an Animation Sequence, Animation Composite, or Animation Montage of your skeletal mesh.
ISM & HISM playback
Play baked animations on Instanced and Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes to render huge crowds in far fewer draw calls.
Multiple LOD levels
Ship several levels of detail so distant instances get cheaper automatically and your frame budget scales with the scene.
Cleaner anti-aliasing
Automatic vector calculation improves normal accuracy so animated instances stay crisp and free of shimmering edges.
Ready-made materials
Included VAT materials and material functions handle the playback math for you — plug in your textures and go.
Runtime helper functions
Blueprint & C++ helpers let you pick and drive animations at runtime by index, cutting development time to a fraction.
Workflow
From skeletal mesh to crowd in four steps
2 · Bake the VAT
The toolkit generates the vertex textures and a static mesh, with your chosen LODs.
3 · Apply the material
Drop the included VAT material onto an ISM/HISM and assign the baked textures.
4 · Drive at runtime
Use the helper functions to select and play animations by index across every instance.
Full setup instructions, screenshots, and API reference live in the official documentation.
At a glance
Technical details
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
- Category
- Code plugin · rendering / animation
- Bake sources
- Animation Sequence, Animation Composite, Animation Montage
- Playback targets
- Instanced Static Mesh (ISM) & Hierarchical Instanced Static Mesh (HISM)
- LODs
- Multiple level-of-detail support
- Included
- VAT materials, material functions & runtime helper functions
- Scripting
- Blueprint & C++
- Available on
- Fab
FAQ
Common questions
What is a Vertex Animation Texture (VAT)?
A Vertex Animation Texture stores per-vertex animation data in a texture so the GPU can replay the animation directly in a material. Because there's no per-instance skeletal evaluation, you can render very large numbers of animated meshes efficiently.
Which animation types can I bake?
You can bake VAT from an Animation Sequence, an Animation Composite, or an Animation Montage of a skeletal mesh.
Does it work with Instanced and Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes?
Yes. The baked animation plays back on both ISM and HISM components — that's exactly what lets you render thousands of animated instances at a fraction of the usual cost.
Can I use it from Blueprints?
Yes. The toolkit ships with runtime helper functions and materials that are accessible from both Blueprints and C++.
Where can I read the documentation?
The full documentation — installation, baking, materials, and runtime usage — is available here.
Get the toolkit
Grab Vertex Animation Toolkit on Fab, or reach out if you need a custom rendering system built for your project.