Any experienced devs have an idea of the performance decrease going from 2-4 bones weighting…
Is character (vertex) animation cpu heavy?
I used to be only art, so of course I turn my nose up at 2 bone animation–but now I’m coding also, and need to watch the cpu :?
I’m guessing it’s twice as much math per character, unless there is a ^2 in there somewhere…
We will have a lot of characters(20-30) per scene, doing a lot of animations, so I’m wondering what our base requirements might be…
If it’s twice a negligible amount, It’s fine…
The only reason I ask, and don’t just test when we are ready is we would ideally like to skin the characters ahead of time with the weighting in mind.
Use 2 bone animation, if you have a good graphic artist he will be able to make it look almost as good and it’s a lot heavier on CPU/GPU to use 4 bones.
Though I think 4 bone skinning is less than twice expensive as 2 bone skinning (maybe 1.5 times or so). I don’t have hard performance numbers, so that’s just my feeling
what exactly is that setting doing, sorry for the noob question but i dont even understand what that means, what does 2 or 4 bones weighing mean?? and how does its change the animation??
Hey Joe, whats the meat in this sandwich?- I dont fully understand this comment.
Should artists strive for minimum bone count, or is there some binding tricks involved? I guess you mean to create meshes with minimum bones that deform well…as oppposed to full skeleton type models…
By the way I think the whole skinned mesh animation system is really amazing. The addMixingTransform and Blending functions are really really clever. Well done there
AC
In GC:Palestine we used 4-bone setups exclusively. When the user was running on a slow machine we would turn it down to 2-bones using quality settings. This worked great. The only place where you could really see 2-bone was in some parts of facial animations…
Again, what is your target hardware? What you really want to do is test it and see
Relatively low spec. We need it to run on laptops, so gma 950 is looking like around the minimum spec… Older hardware isn’t as much of a concern.
The following will sound insane for integrated graphics, but we must have it look great on mid-range hardware…
My main concern is I’m looking to do some serious post process effects–and I’m very worried about the cumulative performance hit of each element. We will need to make some of the effects optional. I’d like to discuss some of these effects with you at some point…
I’m looking at toon shading characters–hopefully light based, but we might throw that out as it’s a bit wacky right now with multiple light sources…
A slightly modified version of the BoostColors script, (hopefully to find a way to make it less jaggy)
And finally some sort of Depth effect, whether it’s depth of field, or something more drastic–(which could eliminate the need to address the jaggies, and kill AA)
Anyway, we are really in the experiment phase for the final look, and we haven’t done too much custom work yet(the cg programmer is coming). Mostly trying to get the runtime look in the ballpark, then optimize from there.
