Question by Essential · Feb 20, 2014 at 08:00 PM · animation shader mesh vertex batching

Clarification on static batching a shader-animated mesh

I've read that objects set to static will be static batched, but you should not do this to any objects that will move, rotate, or scale as it is very inefficient.

However, if a meshes vertices are being animated by a shader does that count as moving? Or can it be safely marked as static in the scene?

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_dns_ · Feb 21, 2014 at 04:25 PM 1

Hi, I don't have an full answer but this information may help:

I think I read that the static flag is used to (pre)compute occlusion more efficiently so if the animation you do is moving vertices too much it may modify the occlusion the object provides and then cause visual glitches.

Also, with dynamic batching, I had problems with shaders that modify vertices positions and I guess it is the same with static batching. Batching merges objects together, this changes the local origin and then the local coordinates of all vertices (before being transformed to world position). It may become a problem if you are using this information in your shaders.