I want to have a large quantity of identical Skeletal Meshes visible in my scene at a time. While with Static Meshes one can instance those to reduce draws greatly. But it seems like with Skeletal Meshes this isn’t really an option in Unreal. Now the question is what can be done from a rendering perspective to increase performance with Skeletal Meshes?
I think only LODs
Mesh LODs, Skeletal LODs and best one is the MasterPoseComponent, but it has some handicap.
One way to optimize Skeletal Meshes is to convert them to Static Meshes whenever possible.
An use case would be having weapons in the game, which in many “tutorials” are created as USkeletalMesh.
Upon debugging with RenderDoc, each Skeletal Mesh will be drawn in a separate draw call, which is logical when having other object-dependant resources like Animation.
Converting them to Static Meshes would result in DrawInstanced a.k.a drawing multiple meshes with single draw call as it removes the possibility to have any unique-per-object resources.