AnimToTexture in Unreal Engine

The purpose of AnimToTexture plugin

AnimTotexture plugin allows to create animated Static meshes that look and behave like Skeletal meshes. This is important especially in the sense of performance optimization, as unlike of static meshes, calculating and rendering animations for skeletal meshes is extremely performance heavy.

What does AnimTotexture plugin do?

AnimTotexture plugin basically takes a skeletal mesh, an equivalent static mesh, and a list of sequences and generates the textures with the weighting information, as well as the bone rotation and translation, and also prepares the material to be able to reproduce it.

Enabling AnimTotexture plugin

To enable AnimToTexture plugin In Unreal Engine 5.1 and above, go to Edit → Plugins, and on All Plugins list search for "AnimToTexture". Enable the found plugin and restart Unral Engine. After the relaunch, the AnimToTexture plugin content is located at All/Engine/Plugins/AnimtToTexture.

AnimTotexture plugin content

BP_AnimToTexture Editor Utility Widget shows an example of using AnimationToTexture node for creating Static Mesh with VertexAnimation and BoneAnimation. All it does is that it runs following function sequence on UtilityWidget Event Run.

• Vertex Animation

• Bone Animation

As you can see, both methods differs by used DataAsset file and attached Material Instances. Actually, both Material Instances are quite identical, used separatelly in this case only to avoid overwriting as both methods (VertexAnimation and BoneAnimation) are processed at once. ..so long story short, the only difference is in configuration declared in the AnimTotexture DataAsset file.

In conclusion, as clear, if we would run the BP_AnimToTexture Editor Utility Widget attached in the plugin, there would be 2 main outputs - Static mesh with Bone Animation (SM_Mannequin_BoneAnimation) and with Vertex Animation (SM_Mannequin_VertexAnimation). By default, they are already a part of the plugin content. The same way may be used for any other Meshes.