Meta Spark AR Vertex Animation Textures

A combination of scripts for Blender and Meta Spark AR to play back arbitrarily deformed geometry in Spark without using bones. It is super performant and flexible.

Quickstart

-Installing the Script in Blender
-Edit - Preferences... - Add-Ons - Install...
-enable Spark AR VAT: Vertex Animation

Exporting an Animation
-Select the animated Object
-Open the Spark AR VAT Tab
-select frame range and output directory
-click 'Process Anim Meshes'
-observe the changed 'Scale Factor' in the UI...

Installing the Shader in Spark AR
-Enable Vertex Texture Fetch in Project - Edit Properties... - Capabilities - + - Vertex Texture Fetch
-Drag and drop SparkVAT.sca into your project

Importing an Animation
-Drag and drop everything from the output directory above into your project
-set compression to 'none' for all imported textures
-make a new material with the shader and populate the outputs
-assign it to the exported mesh from the output directory
-enter the Scale Factor from the Blender UI in the appropriate field

Known Limitations
-Because of Texture Size limits in Spark, this workflow can only process meshes of up to 1024 vertices and up to 1024 frames (roughly 40 seconds at 25fps)
-Vertex Order can't change between frames, which means that the mesh has to stay consistent between frames

Authors
Mate Steinforth

Acknowledgments
Adapted for Spark from the Blender scripts created by Joshua Bogart
Adapted for Blender from 3ds Max scripts created by Jonathan Lindquist at Epic Games.

[pt.pavlo.tkachenko]

That is crazy! Thank you for sharing 🔥🔥🔥

[swapnilsays]

hi, somehow its not working for me in blender.
i am getting this errors while processing.
i installed alternate repo for blender 4

Python: Traceback (most recent call last):
File Foundation\Blender\4.0\scripts\addons\vertex_animation.py", line 372, in execute
bake_vertex_data(context, data, offsets, normals, texture_size, myname)
File Foundation\Blender\4.0\scripts\addons\vertex_animation.py", line 193, in bake_vertex_data
write_output_image(offsets, name + "_position", size, output_dir, context)
File Foundation\Blender\4.0\scripts\addons\vertex_animation.py", line 282, in write_output_image
create_and_save_image(name + "_high", size, high_bytes_list, output_dir, context)
File Foundation\Blender\4.0\scripts\addons\vertex_animation.py", line 255, in create_and_save_image
combined_image.pixels = combined_byte_list
ValueError: bpy_struct: item.attr = val: Image.pixels: array length cannot be changed to 3168 (expected 12672)

Please help..

[MrMarinest]

looks awesome! is it possible to use it in Houdini to Spark pipeline?

[RoniStudio]

I've tried it in Meta Spark version 171 and have turned on the capability, but it doesn't work. And there is no error message. Just metaspark detects the capability is unused. Should I try it in version 173?

[mateuniverse]

now updated so it supports >1024 vertices

[jajajaja]

is it still working? I really want to use it.