Best Practices for Decorative Cinematics

Development World Creation
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I have an island nearing completion and it seemed to be running very smoothly, but then as a final decorative touch I added a cinematic where one mesh was moved through the sky with four attached static meshes, all pretty low-poly --No luck, lag-city.

Having one five-minute looping cinematic with only two keys (one at the beginning and one at the end, started making things lag and jump. I made the simple static meshes “no collision” and obviously “moveable”.

Am I missing any other optimizations? Anything lower than 30fps would look horrible.

Is UEFN just not good at animation? I wasn’t too crazy about iOS/Swift/SceneKit, but you could have thousands of things be animated with zero lag. (Though in Epic’s defense, they are covering many more very diverse platforms.)

PS – I just remembered that I didn’t try making the animated props unlit, so possibly that’s something that I could try.

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Let us know how you go with the unlit animated props change.

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I didn’t see an ‘Unlit’ option in Materials, but I went with “User Interface” with a blend mode of “Opaque”, this gave me a shader with 25 pixel/26 vertex instructions.

I also set “can ever affect navigation” to “off.”

I made some simple static meshes and had four of them looping across my map with a two-key, linear animation. With that setup I saw no lagging.

I’m leaning towards thinking “can ever affect navigation” was the primary lag culprit.

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