Welcome to the Game Tools wiki!

This Blender addon packs several professional-grade techniques commonly used in the video game industry:

• Vertex Animation Textures: a tool that allows you to bake animation data, per vertex, into texture(s).
• Object Animation Textures: a tool that allows you to bake animation data, per object, into texture(s).
• Bone Animation Textures: a tool that allows you to bake animation data, per bone, into texture(s).
• Object Attributes Textures: a tool that allows you to bake data, per object, into texture(s). Previously known as 'Pivot Painter 2.0', it has been rebranded due to improvements that offer greater flexibility and potentially open the door to new workflows.
• Signed Distance Fields: a tool that allows you to bake signed distance fields.
• Data Baker: a tool that allows you to bake various types of data into UVs, Vertex Colors, or Normals, offering great flexibility and advanced bit-packing techniques.
• FFT Ocean Baker: a tool that streamlines the process of baking Blender's FFT-based ocean modifier into a set of tiling, looping textures containing displacement offsets, normals & peaks. This is still under development and isn't available yet.

This wiki includes an extensive Technical Art Compendium that provides additional information relevant to all the tools and techniques listed above.

0.3.2 - Fixes

• Fix: BAT scale baking issue due to unit_axis_order
• QoL: Texture Name property not properly exposed in the Object Attributes baker

0.3.1 - Fixes & New Layout Modes

• New: VAT Baker now supports baking custom normals.
• New: VAT/OAT/BAT Bakers now support a new data packing mode for handling overflow and underflow: "Adjacent/Offset". The original "Adjacent" layout is no longer the default. The new "Offset" mode enables pixel interpolation for frame blending, even when data spans multiple rows. This can introduce complications when scrolling textures, as vertices may sample data meant for others if not properly constrained. However, this is not an issue in Unreal Engine when using the provided content examples and template material functions.
• Fix: Various code cleanups.
• Fix: Preset system corrected.
• Fix: VAT Baker now includes a safety check to prevent texture export if the blend file is unsaved.
• Fix: BAT Baker now correctly reports frame padding information.

0.3 - Public Release

• New: Data Baker now supports numeric packing, allowing 2 or 3 floats to be packed into a single 32-bit UV float, either in the U or V channel. This technique offers much less precision than the current bit-packing method but survives the one-minus operation performed on the V channel.
• New: Vertex Animation Texture now supports stacking multiple rows in a way that still allow pixel interpolation to be used for frame interpolation. New method is called 'Offset', as opposed to the previous method entitled 'Adjacent'. The new option is displayed in the appropriate panel, included in the report and exported to XML as well. Wiki was updated to explain this new method.
• Fix: Fixed an issue when bit-packing three floats with only two data-layers

0.2 - Object Attributes Baker

• New: Object Attributes Baker is live. Documentation & content examples were added
• New: Data Baker can now bake quaternions
• New: Data Baker can make use of a custom property for each object to target another object
• Fix: Data Baker data layer feature couldn't target a layer that was above the selected layer when initially below it, and vice versa.
• Fix: Reduced precision of the bit-packed quaternion algorithm by 1 bit to prevent generating NaNs, which is troublesome even when exporting to .exr files. This isn't ideal but the change in precision shouldn't be noticeable.
• Fix: Object Attributes not reporting quaternion custom order in XML file
• Fix: Object Attributes had an erroneous property description mentioning VAT
• Fix: BAT has an extra safety check for generating UVs
• Fix: BAT not properly checking for uniquely named textures
• Fix: BAT not accounting for ref_frame_padding when reporting number of padded frames
• Various code clean up & property descriptions

0.1 - Early access

• Ocean Baker and Object Attributes Baker are on standby
• All other tools are mostly feature-complete and have passed an initial round of QA.

• Ocean Baker

  • Complete implementation
  • Write doc

• Tech Art Compendium

  • Lumen: Do more research
  • Nanite: Do more research
  • Raytracing: Do more research

• Ideas

  • ABZU's corrective shapekey
  • Adjacency map (nearest uv boundary)
  • Tangent map (spline interpolation for VAT/BAT/OAT)
  • Curve SDF
  • Naughty Dog's method for approximating a vertex animation using armature/bones/weights
  • GoW's foliage billboard generation method