Here is, I hope, an interesting question! I’m working on a game which you could consider to be a god game or city-building game. We would like to have hundreds of animated characters (all using the same mesh and skeleton) walking around. Computing the animation states for hundreds of animated characters quickly becomes CPU intensive.
Barring any great suggestions (because there may be better ways of doing this that I haven’t thought of!), I’m trying to attempt something that I’ve done in the past - but I’m not sure how to do it using UE4. What I’d like to do is to do something like the Instanced Static Mesh component does - but for animated meshes.
I want to animate, let’s say, 15 characters - they’d all be at different animation keyframes to each other. Then I would like to render those characters using different transforms to make them appear at different locations around the map. There would be no need for animation blending!
That way I can fake a big city with hundreds of characters - and minimize the amount of animation state calculations that need to happen.