Ghislain Girardot, renowned for his fantastic Unreal Engine 5 tutorials, has unveiled his latest project in progress, now developed for Blender. This free add-on aims to pack all baking techniques commonly used in the video game industry.In the demo above, the developer demonstrates its functionality with Vertex Animation Textures, which can be generated from static mesh sequences or animation data (such as keyframes, armatures, shape keys, etc.) with only one additional UV map. The tool supports baking multiple objects, all modifiers, and animation retargeting from high-res to low-res meshes.Vertex data, including offset and normal, can be packed using several methods. One method packs each frame into a line of pixels, making animation straightforward to implement in shaders. This method also allows frame interpolation to be handled free through pixel interpolation, but the vertex count must not exceed the texture width.Another packing method allows arbitrary vertex count and vertex data per line of pixels, ensuring you can create power-of-two textures. However, this method is more complex and costly to implement in shaders, and frame interpolation needs to be manually implemented.The baked data can be previewed in Blender, and meshes and textures can be automatically exported along with an XML file containing all relevant data. Currently, Ghislain is working on a UE5 Python script to automate the import of meshes and textures. The ultimate goal is to create a user-friendly, one-click solution for exporting to all game engines.Ghislain revealed that this tool will feature an enhanced version of his original Data Baker add-on, which has previously been an exclusive Patreon reward. This will allow you to bake pivots, axes, hierarchy, and various other data to UVs and vertex colors.The tool is also expected to include support for Pivot Painter, Object Animation Texture, Bone Animation Texture, and other game development-related tools in the near future.Additionally, the developer is making sure that it isnt exclusive to Unreal Engine 5, meaning it will also support OpenGL UV coordinates and other world coordinate systems.We highly recommend following Ghislain Girardot on X/Twitter for the latest updates and join our80 Level Talent platformand ournew Discord server, follow us on Instagram,Twitter,LinkedIn,Telegram,TikTok, andThreads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.Source link The post Blenders Ultimate All-In-One Free Baking Add-On appeared first on CG SHARES.