Hey guys, and I wanted to share a module I have been working on which ports SideFX Houdini’s VAT 3.0 tools to WGSL. Below are some notes, a link to a repository with the code, and a playground to try out some assets generated by the exporter. There are a wealth of interesting tools and tutorials available online (SideFX Labs) explaining how the same tools have been used to create effects for Unreal and Unity.
Please take a look, and let me know what you think.
(from the docs)
VAT3 — Houdini Vertex Animation Textures
VAT3 brings SideFX Houdini’s Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) workflow to modern WebGPU renderers.
Artists author simulations in Houdini and export them as a portable asset package consisting of geometry, textures, and metadata. At runtime, Babylon.js and Three.js reconstruct those simulations entirely on the GPU by sampling animation data from textures rather than evaluating animation or simulation logic on the CPU.
The result is a scalable workflow for rendering cloth, destruction, fluids, crowds, particles, and other complex effects in real time while preserving a clean separation between content creation and runtime implementation.
And from playground.babylonjs.com? The s3 repos (assets and code) require origin headers from that location.
I’m away for the next couple days, but will look through any logs to see what might be the problem. It’s pretty straightforward stuff, and shouldn’t fail to load from the locations I’ve built for.
Please also confirm you are using the link in the thread, as it’s what I’ve meant to support.
Cool. I would guess that targeting the texture layout, as manthrax did for Blender, would make your exports compatible with the wgsl shaders I’ve shared (or his GLSL versions).
