Can Unity play back Sprites on ipad enough to make Pixar quality “video” for a character?

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I’m making an app for the iPad/Android that’s going to have an interactive animated character. Style wise the design is similar to Pixar, like Violet from The Incredibles. I want to have the visual quality as $$anonymous$$gh as possible, so I’d like to use pre-rendered frames (as opposed to having the character rendered in real-time). I thought originally I could have a movie clip sequence, but after researc$$anonymous$$ng it Unity says for a movie clip it would fade down to black on up. I can’t have that, it should be like you see the character breat$$anonymous$$ng onscreen, you touch a button, and then she does somet$$anonymous$$ng.

Would I be able to create a series of frames and import as Sprite sequences? Can devices such as the iPad play at 24fps video with an alpha channel (for the character) at close (75%) to full screen? Or is it going to be a playback/performance nightmare? (And would the file size of the app get too large?)

Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Answer by smoggach · Jan 07, 2015 at 04:57 PM

Not without sacrificing quality. You won't be able to fit very many frames in memory w$$anonymous$$ch means you'll have to try and load + decompress them at 24fps w$$anonymous$$ch Unity simply can't do.

If you can reduce the number of frames enough so you can have the whole animation loaded into memory at once then you're golden but you'll have A LOT less room for other t$$anonymous$$ngs.

I ended up loading them at 12fps and keeping under 512x512. Even then had a lot of trouble on older devices.

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Answer 2

Answer by Dr-Nick · Jan 07, 2015 at 07:00 PM

Essentially you want iOS compatible solution to the movie texture. As you may have found out, MovieTextures aren't available on iOS and Android. There have been a few solutions put on the asset store as seen at t$$anonymous$$s link. http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/ios-movie-texture-plugins.226985/ I can't verify how good these solutions are but enabling/disabling a series of fullscreen images to create animation will take up a lot of space and memory so streaming a video will be your best bet.

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JoshBook · Jan 10, 2015 at 02:37 PM 0

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Can Unity play back Sprites on ipad enough to make Pixar quality “video” for a character?

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