by sharpened·Workflow
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Earns its place in the blender_extensions library for pairing VAT baking with per-clip animation metadata and ready-made engine integration examples.
OpenVAT is a Blender add-on for producing VAT bakes, compatible with Blender 4.2 LTS and newer. Normal data can be handled three ways: left out entirely, packed into the same RGBA texture, or stored in a separate secondary texture.
Version 1.1.0 adds an Animation Data panel for defining animation metadata that gets written into the exported JSON, including a per-animation name, frame ranges, and a loop or non-loop designation. This lets you carve multiple logical clips such as idle, run, and attack out of a single VAT bake. The definitions don't change which frames are baked; the full encoding range is still exported, and frame ranges use global scene frames. For now, this metadata is read only by the Unity import pipeline.
The core tool is licensed under GPL-3.0 or later, while the engine integration examples for Unity, Unreal, Godot, and EffectHouse are provided under a permissive MIT license. The same release also brings Blender 5.0 compositor compatibility. OpenVAT sits at rank 275 in the blender_extensions library.
OpenVAT is best for blender users baking VAT for game engines who want to tag multiple animation clips within a single bake.
OpenVAT is completely free to download and use.
OpenVAT is compatible with Blender 4.2 LTS and newer, and version 1.1.0 adds Blender 5.0 compositor compatibility. The update moves compositor access to a version-safe path, using the newer compositing node group and CompositorNodeTree on Blender 5.0 while keeping the legacy node tree approach on Blender 4.x. The Alpha Over setup and the EXR unnormalize pass were both made version-aware, which removes crashes tied to the undefined CompositorNodeComposite in Blender 5.0. The developer notes the Blender 5.0 compositor API is still evolving, so future releases may need minor adjustments.
OpenVAT's Animation Data panel writes animation metadata into the exported JSON, but for now only the Unity import pipeline reads and uses that metadata. The panel lets you define a per-animation name, start and end frame ranges, and a loop or non-loop designation, which is how you carve multiple logical clips such as idle, run, and attack out of a single VAT bake. Engine integration examples for Unity, Unreal, Godot, and EffectHouse ship in a separate sub-folder, so you can reference those when implementing OpenVAT output in other engines.
OpenVAT's core tool is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. The contents of the OpenVAT-Engine_Tools sub-folder, including the Unity, Unreal, Godot, and EffectHouse integrations, are provided separately under a permissive MIT license. According to the developer, those examples are meant to help users implement OpenVAT output in proprietary engines and can be used directly in production if necessary, since they are not intended to fall under GPL. For current licensing details, check the developer's GitHub page.
OpenVAT's animation definitions do not change which frames are baked. Defining animations in the Animation Data panel only tags ranges inside the encoded data; the full encoding range is still exported, and no frames are skipped or generated differently. The frame ranges are currently global scene frames rather than offsets relative to the VAT bake's start frame. This metadata exists to let you split a single bake into multiple logical clips, and for now only the Unity importer reads it.
OpenVAT is listed as free in this catalog. Its core tool is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later, while the engine integration examples in the sub-folder use a permissive MIT license. For the most current licensing terms and any conditions attached to the different components, check the developer's GitHub page. Distribution and terms can change over time, so the developer's page is the best place to confirm before you rely on it in production.
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