Baked IK animation performance hit

I am working on a project that has hundreds of wires in a scene. Say all of the wires have animation on them and all use 8-12 bones. They won’t animate at the same time. At most, 2-3 might be moving at a time. In Max, I can animate using FK or using IK. If I use FK, I just export the animation and don’t bake it. If I use IK, I have to bake the animations for Unity to understand them. Would all that keyframe data for all those bones cause any type of performance hit? Or does the keyframe data only matter when the animation for that particular object is playing?

Generally speaking - no it won’t matter.

Generally speaking more keys might reduce performance a bit (because of bigger memory footprint and if needs to do searching of keys and so on), but it most likely won’t mater due to these reasons:

  • It won’t mater for rotation and scale at all, because Unity simply oversamples your animation at TargetFramerate anyway
  • It might matter a bit for position, because Unity imports these keys as they are.
  • It won’t matter a lot, because by default you have keyframe reduction enabled, so most likely you won’t have more keys with baking on