Memory usage: Character@anim vs. all-in-one

Unity Engine
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1

Hi all,
This might be an obvious question but really want to clear this up:

If I use the method of having a separate FBX file for each animation of a character I end up with a whole stack of character@anim.FBX files which ALSO contain the full character mesh and are about 1mb each. This method is convenient though as i can remove, rearrange and edit separate anims as i please.

If i put all animations within a SINGLE FBX file in a continuous timeline and specify where each anim starts and ends, the mesh is only stored once creating much smaller file size. This is however difficult to manage if you need to tweak any individual animation once they have been integrated into the game.

The first method results in a huge amount of data being stored in the project files as a copy of the main character mesh is stored with EACH ANIMATION. I’m trying to find out the following:

  1. Is this space taken up in the final build and cause the distribution package to be significantly larger, or does Unity discard the extra meshes on compiling creating an end result equivalent to the second method?

  2. Are these extra copies of the mesh being loaded into memory on the iPhone, or again are they discarded by Unity either at compiling or runtime??

Thanks for any feedback!
P

2

Unity only includes one copy of the mesh’s data. However, it’s possible for you to remove the mesh from your individual @anim.fbx files if you want to save on overall space in your project folder though.