OpenVAT for Godot

kuligs2

I was wondering if anyone used this and how and why is this even a thing?
Is this cheaper than using animation rig?
Is there a way to blend animations?

What your thougts on this?

MikeCL

kuligs2 Oh.. that seems awesome! Definitely going to try it out!

kuligs2 I was wondering if anyone used this and how and why is this even a thing?

I don't think this is meant to replace traditional character rigged animations.
Here's some usecases I think it's more meant for (results from a google search):

OpenVAT is specifically designed to handle scenarios where standard FBX or Alembic exports fail or are too heavy:

Fluid & Smoke Simulations: Exporting liquid splashes or smoke clouds as vertex-level deformations that would otherwise require massive file sizes or complex in-engine physics.
Cloth & Soft Body Physics: Capturing the realistic fold and flow of clothing, flags, or squishy objects (like jelly) without needing real-time physics solvers.
Destruction Sequences: Pre-baked building collapses or shattering objects where every piece must move precisely without overloading the physics engine.
Crowd & Environment Detail: Animating background actors, swaying grass, or flapping birds at a large scale while maintaining a high frame rate.
Geometry Node Animations: Bringing Blender's procedural Geometry Nodes setups—like growing plants or morphing shapes—directly into your game.
VFX & Interactive Shaders: Using baked data to drive reactive effects, such as a mesh that deforms only when a player gets close, by manipulating the texture sampling logic.

Tomcat

kuligs2 Is there a way to blend animations?

Animation is complicated there:

No blending or transitions between animation tracks possible.
…

For encoding multiple baked in animations, you will need to learn how to concatenate multiple animation tracks into one animation track in Blender. This is the hardest part of using this solution. I have created a video on how to append (concatenate) Blender NLA strips into a single track here:

https://github.com/antzGames/Godot_Vertex_Animation_Textures_Plugin

Gowydot

Looks like a tool for Vertex animation baking,

Basic of Animation Baking is to add a keyframe ("taking a snapshot") of every steps of your animation to be exported to game engines. Advantage is your game engine doesn't need to calculate your animation, it just plays those keyframes, disadvantage is file size maybe? more keyframes will increase your animation file size.

Vertex Animation Baking is ..

where you bake out vertex animation data into a texture.
This workflow would involve baking the vertex positions and normals of some simulation mesh out to a texture, then using a vertex shader to reconstruct the original mesh.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/c7616s/does_anyone_know_why_you_would_use_vertex/