Merged Mesh/Thin Instances + VAT

Questions
1

Hello!

I have been spinning my wheels on this issue for awhile and graciously ask if anyone has any insights here…

My case will be creating thin instances of entities and using VAT to drive their animations. I have more requirements later but am trying to get a simple use case spun up, and I must be missing something.. I’ve tried baking the VAT in runtime or using a prebaked bin and I’m running into the same issue: The thin instances are created, but they’re stuck on the original mesh’s first static pose from the animation group and don’t seem to regard the buffer for bakedVertexAnimationSettingsInstanced where I am setting Vector4(from, to, offset, fps) to another animation. The manager is incrementing the time and the mesh is assigned the manager. I’ve also tried not merging meshes and haven’t been able to get things animating from VAT.

Any guidance is appreciated!

PG

PG Without Merge Mesh and baking VAT in runtime

I’d also be open to getting these to work with MeshInstance rather than ThinInstance as well. I will try to get a PG up for that case too

2

Ok let’s start from the start. Does your mesh (not instance, just the mesh) works with VAT?

if yes then we will then add thinInstances then mergeMeshes.

But first the simplest repro: just VAT :slight_smile:

3

Hi thanks for the reply! It turns out my offline VAT baking wasn’t capturing transforms, so yes I ended up peeling this back to a minimal repro and was able to build on this and get instances working with dynamic mesh instance attachment.. here are 1000 instanced animated bears!

The next layer of this I’m working on is using a shared material that supports

  • PBR
  • VAT
  • A sprite sheet for a texture with instanced UV offset/scale
  • instanced tint

This is a learning process for me so I’m trying to figure out whether NodeMaterial or ShaderMaterial is the best solution here but until I get stuck I will keep chipping away at it. When it’s all finished prototyping I’ll be sure to share.

3 Likes
4

Ha! I really prefer that :slight_smile:
This is super cool dude!