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Which is a more optimized way of rotating an object?

Rotate the object via script?
Animate the object and import it in to unity / animate it inside Unity with the Animation View?

edited Nov 20 at 14:07

asked Nov 19 at 12:22

Rune Skovbo Johansen♦♦
2,087●3●9

Rune Skovbo Johansen · Accepted Answer · 2009-11-19 16:26:35Z UTC

I tested this out and there seems to be very little difference.

I tried making a rotating cube in two ways:

With a script attached:

var tr : Transform;


function Start () {
    tr = transform;
}


function Update () {
    tr.Rotate(0.0, 90.0*Time.deltaTime, 0.0);
}

With an Animation component with an animation on it that only drives the rotation.

For both I tried spawning various amounts of them, with and without the MeshRenderer enabled. All objects were visible on the screen all the time.

                         10 obj   100 obj  1000 obj
---------------------------------------------------
Script                  170 fps   140 fps    33 fps
Animation               170 fps   144 fps    35 fps
Script (no renderer)    174 fps   163 fps    48 fps
Animation (no renderer) 175 fps   168 fps    58 fps

As can be seen, using animation is slightly faster for high object counts. If all objects had not been visible on the screen all the time, the advantage of animations would be bigger, when the option is used to switch animations off when they're off-screen (new in Unity 2.6).

This was tested on a Mac. I don't know if the same would apply to iPhone, but my bet would be that animations are still more efficient there. Note that this was tested inside the editor - in a real game all the fps'es would be higher, but these are good enough for the purpose of comparison.

Jessy · Answer 2 · 2009-11-21 00:08:47Z UTC

If you don't cache the transform, every time you use "transform", what really happens is GetComponent( typeof(Transform) ) as Transform. I always cache my transforms because of this. Here's the video where I learned about this.

I always use new Transform transform; and that way, I can still use the word transform exactly the same, only it's faster.

technicat · Answer 3 · 2009-11-21 00:39:40Z UTC

-1

I expect the script would take very little memory, while the animation would take more than a little.

answered Nov 21 at 0:39

technicat
639●1●6

I looked at the memory usage for 1000 objects in both cases and couldn't measure any difference in allocated memory between the animation solution and the scripting one. Anyway, I also created this question + answer to stop (mis)information based on pure speculation and get some hard facts on the table instead. I think it would be nice if we could continue it in this spirit and only post answers when we've actually tested that they're true. – Rune Skovbo Johansen Nov 23 at 9:26

Rotating objects: Script vs. Animation efficiency

3 Answers