Preview

Three variants.

Breakdown

Animation Design Study

Folding patterns are built from layered base sequences—starting with a single-layer motion that is duplicated and scaled to generate complexity.

VAT A
Defined folding sequence and direction for the base layer.
VAT B
Stacked and scaled layers to create the final volumetric folding effect.

Procedural Animation

Transitioned from manual keyframing to a procedural Houdini pipeline for greater flexibility. This setup enables rapid iteration on folding variations and allows for asset swapping without re-shattering geometry.

VAT Hou
Houdini SOP network managing procedural wall division and motion.

The final sequence was baked into Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) to maintain high-performance rigid-body motion within game engine.

VAT Texture Baking

VAT VAT
Encoded position and rotation data layouts.

To optimize texture footprint, only a symmetrical quarter (21 pieces) was processed. Data mapping:

  • U Axis: Per-piece indexing (21 total).
  • V Axis: Temporal frames (640 total).
  • Position Map: RGB for world-space coordinates; Alpha for animation state.
  • Rotation Map: RGB for Euler rotations; Alpha for per-piece sequence offsets.

Blueprint Interaction & Collision Sync

Since VAT-driven motion resides purely in the shader, physical interaction required a function to sync the collision transformations.

VAT BP
Blueprint triggers managing open/closed states.
VAT BP 2
Manually synchronized box colliders matching the VAT sequence.

A virtual function in the parent class handles the core transform logic, overridden in child Blueprints for specific wall variants. The system also includes Z-scale inversion logic to ensure the detailed facade remains oriented toward the player after passage.

Result

In-game performance test (WIP).