EQ Smear Designer

Purpose

Bakes elongated smear frames from measured motion, for stylized animation. It samples an animation clip, then writes a smear mesh with a manifest and a time-indexed playback asset. It prepares smear, ghost-frame and ribbon workflows, and it is bake-first: you analyze the motion, tune a single frame, then bake the sequence.

Menu path

• Tools/EQLabs/Creation/Animation/Smear Designer

How to use

1. Open EQ Smear Designer from the Animation menu. It works on an animated mesh, so have a SkinnedMeshRenderer ready.
2. Assign the animation clip, the source root (the animated object) and the target transform that the smear should follow. Use First Renderer Bone and Use Renderer Transform fill in the target for you.
3. Choose the effect type.
4. Click Analyze Motion. The tool samples the clip and measures its motion.
5. Click Bake Peak Frame Only to bake one elongated smear mesh at the peak of the motion. Use it to tune the look quickly.
6. Click Bake Sequence when the look is right, to bake the whole sequence.
7. Review what was generated in the results panel, which lists the assets recorded on the bake manifest.

Generated assets

• Each bake writes a mesh, a material and a prefab, and a bake manifest that records them. Reveal Generated Folder and Reveal Manifest Folder open the output, and Ping selects a generated asset in the Project window.
• Create Event Clip builds an animation event clip from the selected manifest. Playback and the event clip follow the manifest’s per-frame times.
• Clean Generated Assets deletes the mesh, material and prefab assets recorded on the manifest, after a confirmation. The manifest asset is kept.
• Refresh reloads the results panel.