All of the resources that I’ve found with regard to animations and meshes has been in relation to Ticks and/or Animation Blueprints and/or Characters (of the Character Class with a Collision Capsule).
The performance cost of this, I am aware, is great, simply because any time any actor needs to tick, you start to get into low FPS-city.
So, my question is with regard to a Skeletal Mesh. That’s it. No attachments. That uses an animation like, I dunno, cheering.
Would it be greatly detrimental to have 100 of those meshes play the cheering animation on screen?
It would definitely be noticeable, especially if those meshes have collisions that need to be updated, even more so if they have overlap events enabled
If you want to have that many meshes on a screen, you should look into Animation Budget Allocator, which can dynamically throttle animations based on distance from camera or priority
You can very easily try it and profile, but if you just them to play a specific animation on a loop, it would be much much cheaper to convert it to a vertex animation and play it on static meshes instead
Unreal has the AnimToTexture plugin which can help with the process