Tips for a large amount of animated skeletal meshes

Development Programming & Scripting C++
1

Hi!

We have a lot of animated skeletal meshes (attendance) in our scene and it is decresing extremely the fps. It’s a VR project so we need a high fps rate. These characters dont’ move around, just play animations in place.

Any advice to increase performance??

2

Some tips:

  • If you can, move animation to the vertex shader of the material for simple animation (e.g., foliage etc.)
  • Swap out non-animating meshes to static meshes or ISM’s (only use the latter if you benefit from instancing).
  • Share animation instances to evaluate accross multiple meshes. You’ll have to use C++ for this I believe, and it should be possible.
  • If you go super-advanced, you can optimize the evaluation of animation by avoiding unneccesary memory allocations in the engine - but you need to modify the engine for this. (This should REALLY be a Pull-request by now).

Edit: Nvm, it is a PR now: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/2292

All are fairly advanced techniques, and depends on your situation. Need to see some images / clips to see why you are using enough animations / skel meshes to hit an FPS drop.

Are you sure it’s the animation evaluation causing the drop, or is it just the volume of meshes?