Animation reuse for improved performance

Step 0.

A well-made game shows a lot of characters without losing the quality of the rendering.


In general, fewer bone counts and proper LOD usage will help optimize character rendering performance. A closer look reveals that the animation is being reused. Undoubtedly it will be very helpful. This time, we will do a basic test for 'animation reuse' with Unreal engine 4.



Step 1.

'Set Master Pose Component' is the blueprint we were looking for. I've used it before in another article.
https://gameenginebread.blogspot.com/2017/09/render-skeletal-mesh-with-different.html

Step 2.

Create many characters for testing. I used 21 * 21 characters.



Step 3.

This is the result of reusing the animation. Type console command 'stat anim' to see detail.


'AnimGameThreadTime' : 2.91ms

CPU i7 6700k and Geforce 1060 are installed in the test PC.

Step 4.

Remove link to 'Set Master Pose Component' node and test again.


AnimationThreadTime : 8.14ms

Conclusion and Remaining Issue.

There is definitely an improvement. This is not a final system for release and there is a difference in each system, we will not perform numerical comparison.

Sadly, I will not implement the example here for actual use. Because actual usage is highly dependent on the game system or genre.

Consider the following items to further.
- Reuse of 'Idle' animation is common. 'Walking animation' also consider re-use as much as possible.
- Adjust the frequency of reuse according to the distance from the camera.
- Consider the nature of the herd (e.g. zombies)
- Searching for a master pose target each time is not a good performance. Use a fixed target.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Liquid material in a bottle

Image
This time we will create a liquid material in a bottle. You can think of it divided into liquid surface and inside. Let's implement surface changes. Step 1. Material This is the material. Use the dot to judge the side face to maintain the normal of the side face. Add the Wave Height one more time so that the World Position Offset does not become smaller than 0. Step 2. Bottle Actor The bottle consists of two Skeletal Mesh Components. The internal Skeletal Mesh Component has a Scale less than 1. Glass material for BottleMesh : https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-us/Engine/Rendering/Materials/HowTo/Refraction Step 3. Parameter We have to set 'Actor Up' vector parameter. Result These are the last implemented resources.
Read more

MatCap material

Image
In this post, let's create a MatCap material. Please refer to the link below for a description of the MatCap material. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg5ULaS2jMk or http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/MatCap Step 1. Material This is the material. Step 2. Texture You should have textures similar to the following: Step 3. Result
Read more

How to Make Circular Progress Bar(or Rounded Rectangle)

Image
How to Make Circular Progress Bar? Step 0. Circular bar is cool to look, but find angle(or percentage) per pixel in runtime is costly. Especially rounded tip(or rectangle) is worse. So, we need...  - Texture that has angle per pixel from center.  - The value must have sufficient resolution. 2 byte(1/65536) will be OK.  - Must support various shapes. Step 1. Prepare angle lookup-texture and diffuse texture. Prepare angle lookup-texture and diffuse texture. These are that textures that I made. I'll let you know in another post how I made that textures with C#. Step 2. Import Textures. To keep original value, change lookup texture properties just like a screen shot below. Step 3. Material This is a material that work with the lookup textures. It is Unreal Engine 4 material but you can make it Unity version easily. In most cases, this is sufficient, the improved version will...
Read more