Farm & Feast devs bake walk cycles into textures for 150 Unity pedestrians

The developers of Farm & Feast, a peaceful farming and restaurant management game built in Unity, shared how they filled their town with moving people and vehicles. In a post to r/Unity3D on 2026-10-22, they said the town felt empty, so they added pedestrians and traffic.

The core of the approach is baking animation into a texture (VAT). The team took one of their customer characters and its walk animation, then baked that animation so the GPU can play it without bones. The post doesn't give implementation details such as shaders or settings.

Testing was incremental. They started with a single pedestrian on a plane, then scaled to 10, 50 and finally 150 people. Only after that did they move the crowd into the actual game. The post doesn't include performance figures.

For traffic, the team added cars that keep their distance from each other. The cars also stop and queue when someone is standing in the road, which ties the vehicles to the pedestrian crowd.

This is a developer's own account on a community forum, so treat it as a workflow example rather than a documented Unity feature. The poster said they're happy to answer questions in the thread, which is the place to check for specifics.