One of the first effects I built for the studio. An important step for training is for physicians to know when to swap gloves when they stop becoming sterile. In order to illustrate that, we could do a very simple swap by instant swaps. However I felt it could be pretty powerful if we could actually action the removal of the glove.

So for that end, I build a little pipeline that made it pretty easy to achieve the goal with Vertex Texture Animation. We simulate whatever animation in the artists DCC package of choice. Run it via a Houdini scene that bakes the local positions to a texture that looks like the image on the right in the end.

A similar texture would exist for Normals, and other attributes in specific cases.

In a general sense, I actually rely on textures considerably when needing to add metadata to assets that Unreal doesn’t ingest gracefully, but we need in other scenarios (including shader effects)

This effect had been used in other places throughout the application but the most obvious example is this removal of the glove: