VFX Export Studio — Real-Time VFX Textures from Blender (Unity & Unreal)

Flipbooks, VAT, flowmaps, SDF, distortion, UV-scroll meshes — everything your VFX shaders need, exported straight from Blender.

Why VFX Export Studio

Unity VFX Graph and Unreal Niagara consume baked textures: flipbook sprite sheets for spell effects, Vertex Animation Textures for cloth and explosions, flowmaps for water, SDFs for soft particles, distortion maps for heat haze. Blender has all the raw data — but no straight pipeline to the formats those engines expect. VFX Export Studio is that pipeline.

Features

• Flipbook sprite sheets — N×M grid from a frame range, validated cell sizes
• Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) — bake mesh animation into a 2D texture for shader-driven playback
• Flowmaps — face-normal-derived flow direction for water / lava shaders
• Signed Distance Fields (SDF) — voxelised 3D distance field as a 2D atlas; inside / outside by winding count, correct on rotated, mirrored and inverted-normal meshes
• Distortion maps — normal-based 2D distortion for heat shimmer / refraction
• UV Scroll Mesh generator — procedural ribbon meshes with auto-UVs
• Engine-correct output — PNG / EXR with proper bit depth

Compatibility

• Blender: 4.2 LTS and later, tested on 4.2, 5.1 and 5.2
• OS: Windows / macOS / Linux
• Unity: Built-in / URP / HDRP (VFX Graph + Shader Graph)
• Unreal Engine: 4 / 5 (Niagara + material editor)

Limitations

• VAT needs the same vertex count on every frame; if a modifier changes it, the bake stops and names the frame.
• SDF is voxel-based: 128³ takes about 15 seconds on a 7,900-face mesh.
• The Unity / Unreal setting is a label in the exported JSON; the textures stay in Blender world space for every target.

What you get

• VFX Export Studio add-on (Python only, no DLL)
• README with full quick-start guide
• Free updates for v1.x
• Support through marketplace messaging

Install

Edit → Preferences → Add-ons → Install... → pick the downloaded archive → enable. Press N in the 3D Viewport → VFX Export tab.

License

GPL-3.0. Standard for Blender add-ons. The textures you export are yours to ship in any commercial project.