Skinner is a collection of special effects that use vertices of an animating skinned mesh as emitting points. It uses a special replacement shader to convert vertex positions into GPU-friendly data, and thus it avoids spending extra memory and CPU time for handling them (uses GPU resources instead).
Skinner provides some special asset types to preprocess relevant data.
A Skinner model is a simplified variant of a mesh asset that only has vertices and skin weights. When converted from an original mesh, all the topological data of triangles is removed and overlapped vertices are stripped out.
A Skinner template is a pre-built mesh asset that provides vertices and topological data to the effect renderers. For instance, a Skinner particle template has thousands of particle instances that are placed at the world origin; A Skinner particle renderer will move them at run time.
Skinner also provides some component classes to handle these assets during run time.
The Skinner source component is a subsystem that converts a deformed skinned mesh into baked data. This data will be provided to multiple Skinner renderers.
The Skinner renderer components are special types of mesh renderers that deform a Skinner template based on data provided from a Skinner source. Then it creates some interesting special effects.
Download one of the unitypackage files from the Releases page and import it into a project.
A skinned mesh has to be converted into a Skinner model in advance to be used in the Skinner system. This can be done from the context menu; click a mesh asset to select it, then choose Skinner -> Convert Mesh from the right click menu.
Note that the mesh asset is usually located inside an fbx file. A few extra clicks are needed to select it. See the GIF below.
Drag and drop a character prefab into the scene.
Add a Skinner source component to the game object that has a skinned mesh renderer component. Then set the Skinner model converted in the previous step to the model property.
This Skinner source will override the skinned mesh renderer and then use it to convert vertex data. Note that this character will disappear from the scene, because it will be exclusively used for vertex conversion. If it has to stay visible, another instance of the same character should be added to the scene as a substitution.
Create an empty game object and add one of the Skinner renderer components to it. Then set the source property in it to refer to the Skinner source object created in the previous step.
For starters, it's recommended to use the Skinner debug component that simply visualizes the vertex data provided from the source. If it shows nothing, there may be something wrong in the previous steps.
Currently, the Skinner package provides four types of renderers.
The Skinner debug renderer simply visualizes vertex data provided from a source.
This component doesn't need a template asset.
The Skinner glitch renderer draws triangles between randomly choosing vertices in a source. Although the number of triangles is fixed (21,845 triangles), triangles with long edges or a large area will be pulled out to maintain the silhouette. This behavior can be controlled by the threshold properties of the component.
This component doesn't need a template asset.
The Skinner particle is a particle system that emits particles from vertices in a source. Several parameters (duration, rotation, etc) of each particle can be changed according to the speed of vertices, and thus it can be used to give some emphasis to character movement and trajectory.
The shapes of particles are defined in a Skinner particle template asset. Any shape can be used in a template, but it's recommended to use meshes with the very low poly count because the number of particle instances is determined from the number of vertices in the shapes (low poly == more particles!).
The Skinner trail renderer draws trail lines from vertices in a source. The width of the lines can be changed according to the speed of vertices, and thus it can be used to give emphasis to movement too.
The length of the trail lines is pre-determined in a Skinner trail template asset. The number of lines is also pre-determined by its length. The longer the lines are, the fewer lines are drawn.
At the moment Skinner is only tested on Windows, macOS and iOS (metal). Possibly it runs on PS4 and Xboxone, but not sure about GLES3 and WebGL.