One object with bones vs several objects without bones(animation)

hi, In the context of choosing whether your game character should have one mesh skinned with animated bones , or just break it down to body parts as separate animated meshes and use no bones , the second would be more optimized in terms of a system resources (CPU).

However , beside that ,the choice would affect your pipeline since each has its pros and cons. For example , if you use skinned mesh with a decently low number of vertices, it would be much easier to handle animations, since you can use features like animation retargeting. That way you could use the same animation for different characters. And unity has the built in feature not to update skinned meshes when off screen to save resources.

If you choose the other , it might mean that the animation that you could easily retarget in the first case, must be imported for each character, and you end up with a lot more animations than in the first case , which uses more memory. But with the other option you can easily switch body parts , which can be desired if that is part of your game design.

When making such decisions its best to test each case according to your game design restrictions, since its not the same if you have 5 or 50 characters in your scene.