is there a limit to the number of mesh influencing bones unity can handle. Especially when unity is used in an iPhone application?
I only have 1 character that will be rendered on screen and I want to make it fairly complex (adding facial bones and whatnot). Is this something I can do in unity or would I be limited?
You can have up to 4 bones influencing a given vertex. The optimization notes suggest around 30 bones per mesh as a good number. That said, I have characters that have 70 bones per character and I am seeing a skinning cost of around 1 ms on the PC and Mac (very nice performance in otherwords.) I don't know what the performance is on an iPhone though.
In this as in all things, the profiler is your friend.
4 is the maximum. You can choose between 1, 2, and 4 in the quality settings, although I actually have no idea if the quality settings are used by Unity iPhone.