Bones, no animation - performance

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

Basically I want to know what the performance hit is of an object that has a skinned mesh renderer with bones but no animation or translations (essentially I move the bones myself in code for these type of objects, but 99.9% of the time they aren’t being moved or animated and are just sitting there like regular meshes).

If there are no translations, that should mean that basically it shouldn’t be much heavier than a normal mesh really right? Or do objects with a skin mesh renderer have extra calculations by the vertex shader each update even when bones aren’t being updated?

Thanks in advance!^^

2

Must be someone out there that knows? Sorry for the bump…

3

I do this in Physynth. The entire UI and keyboard is basically a skinned mesh without animation. The performance impact is the same if it has animations or no animations. The reason you’d be doing it is to cut down dramatically on draw calls.

Yes, there is always that impact as far as my testing went. It is not a huge impact.

I move the bones in code.