koobas.hobune.stream
Animate Bones, or Geometry?
As far as efficiency goes, what is better to do: animate on bones, or directly on geometry. A character usually will need bones. but say I have a treasure chest. I could just make the lid a separate mesh, and then animate the rotation of the lid geometry. but I dont know if animating directly on geometry is maybe less efficient than using a bone? (and I hear bones are also taking up a lot of processing power)
Bonus question while I'm here... is there any efficiency gained by parenting geometry to a bone rather than using constraints? or is that just a weird unorganized thing to do that will come back to bite me inside unity.
a great question !
So it's a treasure chest with one bone, VERSUS, a chest and lid model and simply rotating the lid.
I've gotta assume the answer is "of course just the rotation" .. after all, Unity is constantly, endlessly, rotating every single little thing in the scene when you do the slightest thing - and it runs fine, whereas bones are a bit hoggy
BUT you know what ASSU$$anonymous$$E stands for, makes an ASS out of U and $$anonymous$$E :)
Hopefully an expert can answer.
you could easily resolve this by putting 100x of each in a scene and see what happens! of course if you wanna box collider on the lid you're better with just two models (I guess??)
Did a LOT of experimenting with this. my conclusion: animating on geometry vs bones doesnt make a significant difference. What DOES matter is how many separate skinned objects you are creating. (you get 1 draw call per "Skinned Mesh Renderer" in the scene. and there is one of those per every separate mesh which was attached to a bone/bones.) whether you have 10 bones attached to 10 objects, or 1 bone attached to 10 object, doesnt seem to matter.
I suppose then, I should animate directly onto geometry unless there is a situation where I know I will need to robustness of bones.
it's sad there is not a huge discussion about this critical matter. cheers.
yay! I'm the champ, theres my self esteem boost for the day. =D
