Changelog

All notable changes to this asset.

The format follows Keep a Changelog with a Unity Asset Store-friendly slant.

[1.0.0]

Initial release. URP Vertex Animation Texture baking, import, and runtime playback for Unity 2022.3 LTS and Unity 6.

Added

• Bone, Vertex, Alembic, Sprite (Shuriken), and VFX Graph Sprite capture bakers
• URP master shaders for Bone, Vertex, Alembic, and Sprite modes, each with a hand-authored MotionVectors pass for correct TAA / DLSS / TSR
• HLSL include library shared by all master shaders
• Import Wizard for all four EQLabs-native types plus Houdini VAT 3.0 SoftBody, RigidBody, Fluid, and Particle Sprite import through EQVAT shaders
• Houdini VAT 3.0 .mat companion parser and folder auto-detect for mesh, textures, bounds, FPS, frame count, and playback metadata
• Texture validator with auto-fix for Filter / sRGB / Mip / NPOT / Compression / Wrap drift
• EQVATSocketTracker MonoBehaviour for runtime socket follow
• EQVATPlaybackController and EQVATCharacterPlaybackController MonoBehaviours for per-instance loop, one-shot, manual frame, random start, clip ranges, and MaterialPropertyBlock playback
• VFX Graph Sprite output-event contract documentation and missing-attribute bake diagnostics
• Bake quality profiles (Preview / Production / Cinematic / Mobile) with texture-memory budgeting and per-bake timing/memory report fields
• EQVATBakeMetadata ScriptableObject + custom Inspector
• GPU instancing for Bone and Vertex VAT crowds: per-instance playback state (_VAT_DisplayFrame, _VAT_PrevDisplayFrame, _VAT_Speed, _VAT_FrameRate, _VAT_TotalFrames) and a new _VAT_InstanceTint live in an instancing buffer, so MaterialPropertyBlock playback feeds instanced draws instead of breaking batching per renderer. Measured in the included demo on an RTX 3090 (editor play mode, 2000 characters): 58 ms → 10 ms per frame, with the crowd draw cost falling from ~50 ms to ~3.5 ms
• Per-instance colour variation (_VAT_InstanceTint) for Bone and Vertex materials — vary a crowd without cloning materials
• One-shot URP Pipeline Asset setup helper
• Ready-to-play crowd demo scene under Demo/URP — pre-baked crowd with a HUD that scales it from 8 to 2000 instances against a live frame-time readout, a playback-phase debug view, and an orbiting camera (Quaternius CC0 character and its baked output included) — plus a guided Houdini VAT 3.0 import demo scene
• User manual, Houdini import guide, and VFX Graph capture contract under Assets/EQVATLab/Documentation/

Known limitations

• The com.unity.formats.alembic and com.unity.visualeffectgraph packages are not part of the asset; install them to enable Alembic baking and VFX Graph Sprite capture respectively
• VFX Graph Sprite VAT requires an EQVATVFXGraphCaptureSource; arbitrary VFX Graph GPU particles cannot be baked without an explicit output-event capture contract
• Shuriken baking reads CPU particles; GPU-simulated systems are not supported

Roadmap

• HDRP support
• Built-In render pipeline support
• Per-instance custom data (StartTime, ClipIndex)