Is it better for performance to use a video or animation in this case

Unity Engine
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1

Hi ,

I have a few animations ( ~ 60 seconds each) in my game that shows the player some advanced moves as they can be tricky to master. I’m not sure which of the following would be better for performance:

  • Create my animations in maya and export a video file and use that in unity

OR

  • Create my animations in maya and order the clips in unity to give the same effect
2

Try the easier way, and if you’re unsatisfied with performance on your target device, try it the other way.

3

Thanks for that Daniel, could I just ask if its possible to play a video file on the iPhone without it taking up the whole screen?

4

No, it’s not. This is something I’d like to see in Unity iOS, along with better video support in the desktop version. If you agree, please vote for it on the feedback site.

5

This is nothing that is in Unitys hands on iOS though.

Anything but fullscreen would end on cpu purely as apple does not expose hw acceleration through anything but the media player framework → fullscreen, cause apple is as on desktop just playing out its bitch attitude. They don’t offer hw acceleration hooks to render to texture, only to their “fixed isolated environment”.

Skipping hw acceleration, even with the current gen hardware, means that the rest must be rather simple especially if you want to get on native resolutions, you can’t have it as part of an otherwise already more or less taxing environment in any form. Only the ipad could get away with a semi dense environment + movie thanks to its 1ghz cpu ie the 200mhz overhead it can just “sacrifice to pull it off”.
UT is not going to integrate something that grants you at max 30FPS on its own when in, thats why terrain and cloth are not in either, movie is just as hefty if not worse than cloth when used on HD resolution devices

Even Bink which is one of the fastest available codecs used on consoles, desktop and mobiles, is inable to pull this off, a “normal 3d environment as without the video” + realtime video on a texture which you update each 1-3 frames depending on the movie FPS.