Animated soldier

Unity Engine
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1

Hi

I love the soldier in the new unity demo but I was wondering if there is anything less heavy existing for the iphone.

I want to do a game similar to counter strike on iphone/android but I never worked with animated meshes. Any idea if there is a soldier pack with animations and stuff that works fluently on the iphone? I’m googling without much luck.

Thanks and merry xmas!
Joaquin

2

Hi,

maybe you can try the Marine Pack at http://wekkogames.nl/. Their models have 5500 polycount , not that low poly , but might work.

–
oxl

3

5500 on the iOS animated?
Hell no, definitely not.

I’m not aware of any “shooter” focused thing that does not automatically assume “shooter visuals and shooter standard hardware”.

In addition, I’m not ware of many if any iphone / mobile oriented model packs at all as iOS devs <<<<<<< pc hobbiest and already with normal model packs you don’t earn thaaaat good actually (which means iOS focused packs are primarily done for portfolio reasons cause they are a granted lose money if you want to do it professionally)

What I would recommend is actually getting the Mr Bones animation packs ( http://www.truebones.com/ ) and take their skeleton to model your own solder or fit a lower poly non animated solder around it (TheGameCreators online store is helpfull here, cause they only have ugly crap assets which are commonly in the poly range suited for mobile :wink: - if you combine them with the truebones animation you can get rather decent results and using something cheap as fragmotion on windows or comparable allows you to do it rather fast.

4

thanks,
yeah 5500 it’s way too much for iphone, i don’t even think the unity demo soldier has that many polys

5

Skinned meshes kill the framerate on iDevices. Or cut them in half based on turning the mesh on or off from my limited testing. That isn’t so bad if you are already getting high frame rates above 60 as you end up with 30FPS. However, if one modeled the character in parts and made the joints textured and shaped so that the rotation of the joint did not produce noticeable artifacts, or extended helmets over necks or padding and straps at joints like knee pads and rear holding straps, or pistol holsters/web belts with crotch to outer thigh straps. If done like this then only the character part transforms are calculated as opposed to all the vertices based on character joint rotations. Then you could actually get a shooter and an enemy on screen without dropping to 1- 8fps.

HTH
BTH

6

I’m not saying someone should be doing this, but skinning 20 thousand vertex model (soldier dude from our Bootcamp demo), with normals tangents, takes 3 milliseconds on iPhone 4 in upcoming Unity 3.2. Skinning tangents (i.e. with a bumpmapped shader) is not optimized in the current (Unity 3.1) version, but skinning without tangents should be quite fast. How much is 3 milliseconds? If there was only skinning, 3 milliseconds would be 300 FPS. Just sayin’…

That is, with animated bumpmapped characters, there are multiple places that might be the bottleneck (and not all of them are “skinning is slow”):

  1. You could be limited by the GPU fillrate, to render the bumpmapped shader. Built-in Bumped Specular is not the fastest shader out there, because it’s made for the “generic case”. In upcoming Unity 3.2, we’ll add a more limited, but much faster (like, 5 times!) mobile bumped specular shader using some of the tricks from here.
  2. You could be limited by playing animations.
  3. You could be limited by skinning, especially if you’re not hitting the optimized skinning paths.
  4. You could be limited by memory bandwidth, if you’re using bad texture formats or textures without mipmaps.
  5. …could be limited by something else as well!

Easiest way to check is to enable iOS profiler in AppController.mm and looking at Xcode output when running the game.

7

yes, I downloaded a 5000 verts soldier yesterday, with skinned meshes and put 5 of them on screen running/jumping and so on.
with 3.2b3 runs fine on my android nexus one. you can see it slowed down but it’s actually pretty decent. I was expecting it to go at 2fps and it feels more like 20fps

very nicely done with unity 3.2

8

as for nexus one (it is android, right? ;-)) we have some more optimizations planned
But i didn’t tell you anything