VAT Generator
Applies to SuperStage 26H2.6 and later
Purpose
Bake character animation into textures for large crowds.
There is a help button in the top-right corner of the panel.
1. What It Produces
It turns an animated character into something a stage scene can show in very large numbers. Instead of playing the animation joint by joint, the movement is baked into textures and replayed by the material, so a crowd costs a fraction of what the same crowd would cost as ordinary animated characters.
Each item you generate produces three things:
| Output | Description |
|---|---|
| VAT mesh | The static mesh for the character |
| Animation textures | A pair of textures (position + normal) for that one clip |
| Material instance | Ready to use, with the textures already plugged in |
Drop the VAT mesh into the level, assign the material instance, and it plays. Generated characters can be added to the Super Crowd character list.
2. Building the List
| Button | Effect |
|---|---|
| Add Selected | Takes whatever animation sequences are selected in the Content Browser and adds one row each. The character mesh is filled in automatically from the animation's own preview mesh, so most of the time you only need to check it |
| Add Item | Gives you an empty row to fill in by hand |
| Clear | Empties the list |
| Remove | Drops just that one row |
Every row needs both an animation and a character mesh, and the two must belong to the same skeleton. If they do not, the row says so in place of its destination folder and is skipped when you generate.
3. Generating
Generate VAT first asks where the results should go. Pick a folder and everything is filed underneath it automatically: one folder per character, and inside it one folder per clip. Once you have chosen a folder, each row shows the exact destination it will write to, so you can check the layout before committing.
A progress dialog tracks the whole batch and can be cancelled at any point. Whatever finished before you cancelled is kept; the summary line at the bottom tells you how many were created, skipped and failed.
Long clips and dense meshes take the longest, because the work is proportional to frames multiplied by vertices. The progress bar is measured in frames, so it moves at an honest pace rather than jumping per item.
4. Re-running and Reusing
Generating is safe to repeat. Anything that already exists at the destination is left alone and reported as "already exists" rather than being rebuilt, so you can add a few new clips to an existing list and run it again without waiting for the old ones.
Several clips of the same character share a single VAT mesh — it is built once and reused for every clip in the batch. To force a rebuild, delete the existing assets in the Content Browser first.
A row that fails is shown in red with the reason on it. The two common ones are a mismatched skeleton and a name that cannot be used as an asset name; fix the row and run again, and the rows that already succeeded will simply be skipped.
5. Notes
- A generated VAT character is a static mesh with material-driven animation. It does not take part in the skeletal animation system and cannot switch clips at runtime;
- Each clip of a character costs its own pair of textures, so more clips means more memory;
- 13 VAT characters already ship with the plugin (see Super Crowd); this tool is for adding your own.