Ghislain Girardot

Have a great week ☀️

Get more from Ghislain Girardot on Patreon creating educational UE projects and a video game!

Now that I’m out of my Python rabbit hole, it’s time to cook up more juicy UE stuff.

Plenty of good things already live on my Patreon—thanks so much for the ongoing support 🥰

More coming soon 👀
www.patreon.com/c/GhislainGir

GitHub - GhislainGir/GameToolsDoc: Wiki for the BlenderGameTools repo & Blender/UE files Wiki for the BlenderGameTools repo & Blender/UE files - GhislainGir/GameToolsDoc

Files can be found in my Examples Content project for my Game Tools Blender extension: github.com/GhislainGir/...

YouTube video by Ghislain Girardot Driving VATs & Shaders in Unreal Engine Using Niagara and State Machines

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYI7...

🥳 New video is live!
I walk through building a lightweight custom state machine in Niagara to drive Vertex Animation Textures in Unreal Engine.

Part 1 of a short (probably 2-part) series on Niagara state machines. 🧵

⚡Sketch 004⚡

Post process practice.
Mentor: @ghislaingir.bsky.social
Class: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

#gamedev #realtimevfx #rtvfx #techart #ue5

#UE5 #vfx Making use of my Bone Animation Textures baker :) GPU Niagara Swarm with custom AI + nearby obstacle/particle avoidance and the ability to pull particles out of the sim to convert them to CPU AI agents, and push them back to the GPU sim. Still a few quirks to solve.

Glad it got people excited! Feel free to reach out if you need help :)

I wasn't too confident spending 5+ months working on coding a tool that implements a bunch of decade(s)-old techniques... but it sounds like people are interested in it! Kinda relieved :D

Great tools always come with good doc :D or something. Thanks!

Feel free to reach out if you need any help 😊

Get more from Ghislain Girardot on Patreon creating educational UE projects and a video game!

Material functions that streamline the use of this tool are included as a plugin—ready for you to copy and paste right into your projects.

Special shout-out to my incredibly generous Patreon community who've kept me afloat all this time: patreon.com/c/GhislainGir

You’ll also find plenty of Unreal Engine content examples in the Doc repo., including hundreds of samples with source files. The Blend files are especially useful, letting you explore exactly how the tools were set up to achieve the demonstrated results.

The accompanying Wiki page offers detailed information and quick-start guides, packed with theoretical insights to help you understand the concepts behind the different tools.
Worth the read for junior tech-artists, even if you don't plan on using these tools.

GitHub - GhislainGir/GameTools: A blender addon packing several professional-grade techniques commonly used in the video game industry A blender addon packing several professional-grade techniques commonly used in the video game industry - GhislainGir/GameTools

The tool is completely free and can be installed directly from Blender’s official extension system—just search for “Game Tools.” You can also participate in its development and report bugs here: github.com/GhislainGir/...
Wiki: github.com/GhislainGir/...

Each data channel can come from:
• The object itself
• Its parent
• A custom object
• An object linked via a custom property
Allows for workflows like Pivot Painter-style hierarchy baking (with some caveats).
Great for tech artists!

Supported data types:
• Position
• Axis
• Shape Key (offset/normal)
• Mask
• Random (float1, float2, float3)
• Value
• Custom Property
• Frame
• Hierarchy Depth
• Quaternion

5. Data Baker
Bake object properties into UVs, Vertex Colors, and even Normals.
It supports numeric & bitwise packing:
• Pack 2–3 floats into a single 32-bit UV channel
• Store two values using the int/fractional parts of a float
Example: bake XYZ pviots pos into one UV map!

A major upgrade: full hierarchy pre-bake. This avoids costly parent-to-parent texture fetches in the vertex shader. You can also limit hierarchy depth—treating deeper children as part of their parent.

You can disable Pivot Painter’s original 16-bit encoding if needed. Element indices can be packed into 8-bit format when working with ≤ 256 unique elements. Data can be baked to textures or vertex colors.

You can bake a wide range of object-level properties:
• Position
• Axis
• Scale
• Extents
• Hierarchy
• Custom properties
• Quaternions

4. Object Attributes
A complete reimagining of Pivot Painter—rebuilt from scratch to support both old and modern workflows. It lets you fully bake complex hierarchies and reconstruct them in the vertex shader.

Animation data supports:
• Position
• Rotation (axis-angle, quaternion, bit-packed)
• Scale
• Axis
• Custom properties
Everything can be remapped for 8-bit texture storage, including skinning (if ≤ 256 bones).

BAT includes everything from the VAT Baker and more.
Skinning data is fully customizable—you can even store bone indices & weights in vertex colors if needed.

3. BAT (Bone Animation Textures)
BAT is more advanced than VAT.
• Skinning data = per vertex
• Animation data = per bone per frame
✅ Much smaller memory footprint than VAT
❌ Only works with skeletal animations
⏳ Vertex shader cost varies with bone influence count

You can bake:
• Position
• Rotation (axis-angle, quaternion, bit-packed)
• Scale
• Axis
• Custom properties
All of it can be remapped for 8-bit texture storage.

Like the VAT Baker, OAT supports any coordinate system & scale.
It includes:
• Overflow/underflow handling
• LH/RH system support
• One-click mesh/texture/XML export
• Frame stepping & padding

✅ Lower memory usage than VAT
✅ Vertex shader still lightweight
❌ No vertex deformation—only object-level motion is supported

2. OAT (Object Animation Textures)
Unlike VAT (per vertex per frame), OAT bakes data per object per frame. Great for keyframed object animations or rigid body sims, played back directly in the vertex shader.

You can bake:
• Vertex offset
• Position
• Normals
Each channel can be remapped to fit into 8-bit textures if needed.

It’s the most feature-complete Blender VAT baker I know of.