EQ VAT Lab

EQ VAT Lab is a Vertex Animation Texture (VAT) suite for Unity URP. Bake per-vertex animation data into floating-point textures and play it back with a vertex shader at GPU speed — enabling massive crowds, large-scale destruction, and replayable VFX at a fraction of CPU skinning cost.

A skinned character baked in Bone mode: pick a quality profile, bake, and the baked copy plays the same walk from two textures with no Animator.

Scope

V1 covers the Bone / Vertex / Alembic / Sprite / VFX Graph Sprite EQLabs-native bakers, EQLabs-native VAT import, and Houdini VAT 3.0 import through EQVAT shaders. Houdini support is import-only: bake/export in Houdini, then import the output mesh, textures, and .mat metadata in EQVAT. VFX Graph support is a capture-bridge workflow, not arbitrary GPU particle readback.

V1 is URP-only. HDRP and Built-In support are on the roadmap.

Credits

• Tool author: Ibrahim Afara (EQLabs)
• Reference material behavior for Houdini VAT 3 import: SideFX Houdini VAT 3.0 + AnimToTexture + OpenVAT

In this manual

• Quick Start: Project requirements, the URP asset, your first bake, placing the result and attaching a socket.
• Reference: Per-mode notes, texture import settings, material parameters, motion vectors, GPU instancing, runtime playback, bake budgets and output management.
• Troubleshooting: Symptoms, likely causes and fixes for VAT playback, textures, shaders and bakes.
• Houdini VAT 3.0 import: Import a Houdini VAT 3.0 export: the wizard steps, the supported modes, the .mat companion file, texture settings and limits.
• VFX Graph capture contract: What a VFX Graph has to emit so EQ VAT Lab can bake its sprite particles.
• Changelog: The release history of EQ VAT Lab.