Vertex Animation Texture Tool

[clintonman]

Update to the Vertex Texture Animation script that never had an installer and also updates the Unofficial Update version of the tool.

The major reason for the changes was that the original script had a big bug that prevented some motion from being defined in the textures. It was basically trying to use negative color values. The original script only works with morph animations. This updates expands it to include actor animation and deform animations.

Changes:


fix major bug that limited the motion - bad math had negative value assumption, exportable colors only positive
now has a full load on demand installer
replaces corresponding uu scripts and updates the uu button
automatic: includes the manual steps needed with the old bare script
works with actor and deformation animations - uses command node loops to update scene changes for reading
"absolute", non-relative, mode works - older version did not work
separate scale controls for X,Y and Z for improved motion resolution inside 256 values for each XYZ direction
naming change VTA to VAT and make naming less confusing fro the generated files
new system to drive the preview animations inside tS - no longer requires stack view and special processing, it adds a moving object to the scene and that updates the texture based animation previews


https://clintons3d.com/plugins/truespac ... xture.html

[clintonman]

Update November 2024

adds support to save EXR float format images

The HDR Image Generation option used to create a HDR format image. Testing showed that the tS HDR image export is low quality. This latest change replaces the hdr image export with an exr image.

[clintonman]

Update December 2024

The main motivation for this latest change was to ability to combine VATs in the shader.

What I have so far is exported character, sounds and vertex animations from a Deus Ex mesh. The animations include mouth shapes. I used a program called Papagayo to translate the character speech into mouth shapes and wrote a script to make the morph keyframes inside tS. I created a series of meshes in order with morph animations for eye blinks, the mouth shapes, head movement and finally full body movement. The meshes are all daisy chained together and the combined animation on the final mesh object holds up and mouth movement matches the sound. Now each of the meshes can be used to create VATs and they can be combined in the shader in the game engine giving the same result. The combinations are very limited, but it does work out for what I wanted to do, add dialog to a character using the VAT techniques.

Changes:

new Relative Reference Pose option can combine resulting VATs in the shader.
add check for non-instanced materials
Relative Motion shows "disabled" if HDR or Relative Reference Pose
new hints of what to expect when running with the selected options

Dec 30 2024
first working basic shaders for Unreal 5 and Godot 4.3 were added to the page
next will be final versions that can combine animations and read multiple animations from a single VAT

[Finis]

You are appreciated Clintonman. For your hard work keeping U3DA going https://www.united3dartists.com/forum/v ... php?t=6783 and for keeping TS going. Though I don't use TS anymore (not Blendering much lately either, busy) I'm happy to see it is still out there and still used.

Thank you!

[clintonman]

Thanks, that was a rough day. I'm still using tS and setting aside a little time each day to learn more Blender.