Bake Your Animations to Greatly Improve Performance...For Some Use Cases

In this Unity tutorial you will learn how to bake animations as a series of "snapshots" of meshes. These snapshots can be taken at a configurable framerate that suits your game.

The concept here is attacking a similar problem as Animation Instancing: https://blog.unity.com/technology/animation-instancing-instancing-for-skinnedmeshrenderer, but is still handled by the CPU and does not require any "shader magic" to manipulate the vertices.

It also does not reduce the Draw Calls, as Animation Instancing will do. Instead, this approaches the problem by resolving the "CPU Skinning" taking up a lot of CPU time on the main Unity thread to improve FPS.

This can be taken one step further to batch all the meshes into a single draw call per material via Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced(): https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced.html

Strangely, with my initial attempt, the performance was actually worse than what is implemented here. I didn't have time to dive into that and the performance here was "good enough" for my use case.

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📚 Resources

⚫ Bake Skinned Mesh Renderer Mesh: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/SkinnedMeshRenderer.BakeMesh.html

⚫ Graphics Draw Mesh Instanced: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced.html /

⚫ Animator Play: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Animator.Play.html

⚫ Animator Update: https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Animator.Update.html

⚫ "Woodsman the Peasant" video that inspired this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMdncCPpjyE

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