For the iPhone (and kind of for Unity) what’s the best fps for animating a character? I’ve read the docs and seen the Unity animations play back at 60, but I imagine a character done say in Maya would be at 12 or 24- any benchmarks?
C-
Hate to repost, but is there a better place to ask my FPS question (a few posts back?)
TIA
Chuck
It’ll be hard to get a specific answer on your situation. Asking about performance is kind of like asking, “How long is a piece of string?”
You’re going to be wasting data if you create your animations at a much higher frame rate than your game will be running. iPhone will exacerbate the tradeoffs you’re already making on desktop/web projects. It’s pretty easy to overwhelm the device’s specifications. Your FPS will depend on how much content you want to push in there and how much responsiveness you need for the game type (turn-based strategy versus platformer, for example).
If I were you, I would aim for 20 FPS…
Edit: A target frame rate for the game, I mean. If you’re doing a ton of animation content and have even a remote chance of up-porting your game to web/desktop after iPhone, you should animate at a higher rate (24? 30?).
Hey Matthew
Thanks for your reply. It was really kind of a 2 parter. First on the iPhone- but secondly a little more generic on importing animations. I know that you cannot predict the FPS on all devices- but I was wondering when you import animations on a model from say Maya, if the animations are created at 24 FPS and the player is running at 60, do the animations on the model cap out at 24?
Thanks a ton for your help.
C-
It’ll smoothly interpolate between the frames that are there. If your animation is 5fps but the game is running at 100fps, it’ll create in-between frames for you (it won’t look jerky or stop-motion).
I heard that Unity samples at 30 fps when importing animated models, so I guess the best option would be to animate at same rate, for general purposes (not for iphone). If we animate at say 60 fps, Unity could loss the extreme poses when resampling if it records only the previous and the next frames to the extremes. Does it make any sense at all? Can somebody confirm or discuss?
Great- Thanks a lot Matthew. That helps.
C-