A technical artist demonstrates a GPU-driven crowd system capable of animating 6,072 stadium spectators on a single game thread using Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) and Hierarchical Instanced Static Meshes (HISM) in Unreal Engine. The full pipeline covers procedural seat extraction in Houdini via VEX, baking multiple animation states (Idle, Clap, Yell, Stand, Wave) into 16-bit VAT textures, and a custom Unreal material that handles animation blending, per-instance color randomization, and a GPU-computed stadium wave effect entirely in the shader. Compared to standard skeletal meshes, the VAT+HISM approach reduces game thread time from 34.15 ms to 0.66 ms, cuts draw calls from 21,369 to 276, and nearly doubles FPS from 28 to 57 on an RTX 3070.
