Would There be Better Performance when Animating Different Body Parts or the Whole Body?

Hello!

I am currently building an FPS and I build all my models in Blender. I wanted to know, in terms of basic player models for my characters in the game: should I animate different body parts for different things? Like, say one of my players wants to look around, I could make a seperate head and attach it to the body with code, which also moves by itself. This can also be with the arms for running, running with a weapon, and just holding a weapon.

Would this be better to use in terms of performance, or not?

Also, I wanted to know, because I have multiple characters in the game, would it be possible to create a template animation in Blender or Unity (maybe using RigidBodyController?) as like a preset, so when I make a one model, I can just add the animation to it and it works. Would this be possible, and if so, how?

Thanks in advance! :slight_smile:

Hi so this sounds like two questions, to answer the first paragraph and following sentence regarding performance and separate body parts;

1) It depends - if you are using Mecanim, which is actually designed to handle separate body part animations efficiently using body masks and layers then the answer would likely be no, you’d be best using it as it was designed so that Unity animation system can apply animations to the parts that you need. In other words your head/arms can be separate meshes but your skeleton should be intact. Further documentation and tutorials are available here:

If you are talking about using legacy animation system then the answer would be to profile and compare to asses the performance for your alternate configurations. This post about performance may help influence your decision:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/167483-Mecanim-performance-question

And regarding templating your animation e.g. the second paragraph

2:) Mecanim animation system is designed so that you can use any humanoid animation and re-target to any humanoid, so yes any animation you create (call it a template if you like) for a character can be used on any of your other character models. Again please refer to the docs and tutorials above for more info