// the find
keijiro/Skinner
Special Effects with Skinned Mesh in Unity
Skinner turns a Unity skinned mesh's animated vertices into a GPU-friendly data buffer via a replacement shader, then feeds that into four bundled effect renderers (debug, glitch, trail, particle) for character-driven VFX like the ones in keijiro's demo GIFs. It's aimed at Unity technical artists who want vertex-position-driven particles/trails off a rigged character without writing the GPU plumbing themselves.
The core trick — baking skinned vertex positions into a texture via a replacement shader instead of reading them back on the CPU — is a legitimately good pattern for avoiding SkinnedMeshRenderer.BakeMesh() overhead, and it's a clean example to study even outside the plugin. The Skinner Model/Template split (strip triangle topology, keep only vertices+weights) is a sensible optimization for effects that never need to render the original mesh. Four renderer types (debug, glitch, trail, particle) cover a decent spread of use cases from one shared source component.
Last commit is from October 2019 — six years stale, no Unity version compatibility guarantees, and it predates the Scriptable Render Pipeline entirely, so URP/HDRP users are on their own. Distribution is a raw .unitypackage from GitHub Releases with no UPM manifest, so there's no clean way to pull it in as a versioned dependency or keep it updated. It vendors other keijiro packages (Klak, Kvant, PostProcessing) directly into Assets/ rather than referencing them, which is a recipe for version conflicts if a project already uses any of those elsewhere. Compatibility is explicitly only verified on Windows/macOS/iOS-Metal per the README, with GLES3 and WebGL support left as an open question.