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Quick Start Guide

Initial Setup

1. Choose Your Animation Type

Right-click on your skeletal mesh and choose between two options:

  • Make Bone Animation
    While this method enables animation sharing and accommodates more animations and vertices than Vertex Animation, it is not as performant. For maximum FPS in crowd animations, consider using Vertex Animation instead.

  • Make Vertex Animation
    This method is more performant and requires larger textures but has lower material costs. However, it doesn't support animation sharing, meaning multiple meshes cannot use the same animation asset.

Which should you choose?

Consider these trade-offs:

  • Bone Animation: Best for sharing animations across multiple meshes or when using many animations
  • Vertex Animation: Best for performance and lower material costs

2. Select Animations

After choosing your animation type, you'll see a window displaying all compatible animations for your mesh. Select the animations you want to include in your VA Asset Collection.

Animation Selection

  • Use "Select All" or "Deselect All" to quickly manage your selection
  • Individual animations can be toggled using the checkboxes
  • Click "Create Asset" when you're satisfied with your selection

3. Save Your Asset

Choose a location in your content browser to save the new VA Asset Collection.

4. Material Adjustment

Since this is a Vertex Animation system, your materials will need to be modified. A window will appear showing any material errors that need to be resolved.

Material Errors

5. Resolve Material Issues

When resolving material errors, you'll have two options:

Material Resolution Options

  • Create Copy
    Creates duplicates of your materials before making the necessary changes (recommended to preserve originals)

  • Modify Original
    Directly modifies your existing materials

6. Final Result

After completing these steps, you'll have a new VA Asset Collection in your content browser.

VA Asset Collection

7. Using Your VA Asset Collection

After creating your VA Asset Collection, you have three options for using it in your project:

  • In the Crowd Tools Editor Mode
    Use this mode for easy placement of crowd characters with an intuitive editor interface.

  • In a Vertex Anim Mesh Component
    Perfect for adding vertex animation to a single actor in your scene.

  • In a Vertex Anim Instanced Mesh Component
    Ideal for efficiently rendering multiple instances of the same vertex-animated mesh.

Next Steps

Now that you've created your first VA Asset Collection, you can: