Animate Bones, or Geometry?

Question

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.

Answer 1

Answer by Turtlemaster · Sep 24, 2012 at 09:11 PM

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.

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Fattie · Sep 25, 2012 at 06:09 AM 0

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totally awesome, thanks for that. You're the champ

Fattie · Sep 25, 2012 at 06:09 AM 0

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it's sad there is not a huge discussion about this critical matter. cheers.

Turtlemaster · Sep 25, 2012 at 12:40 PM 0

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yay! I'm the champ, theres my self esteem boost for the day. =D

Animate Bones, or Geometry?

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