GPU ECS Animation Baker

GPU ECS Animation baker combines the power of DOTS ECS with GPU Animation baking & instancing to allow you to animate tens of thousands individually animated characters.

The GPU ECS Animation baker allows you to convert you existing animators & skinned mesh renderers to GPU ECS animators. 

The animators are convertable to ECS entities and the animations run entirely on the GPU.

This allows you to add crowds of animated characters to your Unity game. You can build realtime strategy games with large armies of individually animated characters, while preserving a decent framerate.

Technical details

GPU ECS Animation Baker will bake all vertex bone weights into the UV channels of the meshes (uv1, uv2 & uv3) + all the bone transforms per frame into animation textures.

A custom vertex shader will take care of the rest.

An ECS animation system takes care of updating the shader values each frame.

The custom vertex shader is implemented as a ShaderGraph Subgraph, so it can be easily integrated in any of your existing ShaderGraph shaders.

The baker supports LODS, blending & transitions.

In principle all features that are supported by the Skinned mesh renderer, can be used during the baking process into the animation textures, although it's important to realize that the skinned mesh renderer is not used at runtime, only during baking.