Baking VATs

Bake output

After you set the mesh transforms and materials, you can bake the animations. Select Bake in the lower-right corner of AutoVAT.

The Bake Settings window opens before the bake starts. Use these settings to change the clip order, asset name prefix, start frame, and frame rate (FPS). Clear a clip checkbox to exclude that clip from the bake. You can also apply mesh transforms and pad textures to a power of two for texture streaming. Trial accounts can complete 4 successful single bakes; failed or cancelled bakes do not use a trial bake.

You have two options: Export VATs and Import to Engine. Select Export VATs to bake the VAT assets without importing them into a game engine. Select Import to Engine to bake the VAT assets and then continue to the engine import step.

To export the VAT assets, select an export path. Then, enter the subpath. In this example, AutoVAT creates the DEMOS\Tree folder inside the BakedVats folder on the Desktop. Use the File Prefix to specify the names of the generated asset files.

Selecting Import to Engine takes you to the engine import step. The next section explains how to export and import assets for each supported game engine.

Batch Bake

When you have many similar assets, you can bake them in sequence. For best results, use assets that have similar materials and animations. Batch Bake is available to paid AutoVAT accounts.

To batch bake assets, select Batch Bake in the upper-left corner of AutoVAT. Then, select the folder that contains the asset subfolders that you want to bake.

You must supply the assets in a consistent folder structure. The diagram shows the structure from left to right. The main folder contains one subfolder for each asset.

In each asset folder, keep the mesh files separate from the texture images. Do not mix these file types. In this example, SKM_AvocadiniGuffo.FBX contains the mesh, and the other three FBX files contain animations for its skeleton. This structure is common for assets that are re-exported from UE5.

The Textures folder must contain only one texture. This texture must be the base diffuse color texture for the asset. Do not put normal maps, masks, or other texture files in this folder. AutoVAT detects this texture and uses it for the default material Texture Sample node.

Use the same folder structure for each asset in the batch. This lets AutoVAT transfer the material settings between assets and automatically replace the base diffuse texture for each asset.

Continue to the Exporting section.