Should i bake the skinned mesh?

Questions & Answers
1

As I focus on mobile game development, performance is always a great bottleneck for me. I am thinking if baking skinned mesh helps.

Let’s say I am making a game with a crowd of soldiers. They are all with the same mesh and only have two simple animations: idle and walk. Is it worth it to make a script baking the animated mesh? It seems it can save the processing of skinning, and probably allow dynamic batching if my solders have very few vertices.

Do you suggest I should make all the soldiers use baked meshes? or only the soldiers far from camera?

2

Unity 4 offers an option to ‘optimize mesh’ on import for skinned meshes that will do the baking for you.

Otherwise, the more you can do in edit-time to save performance of run-time the better (especially so on mobile devices), so I’d say it’s definitely worth it to write a script for that (if you can’t use the built-in option, that is).