SkinnedMesh / Animation lazy updating?

Unity Engine
1

Hi,

While trying to improve performance in my application, I profiled my application and found out two different things :
A) SkinnedMesh updates the mesh even if nothing changes.
B) Animation.Sample still takes a while even if no animation is playing.

The combination of the two leads to to a big performance hit - about 30-35% of each frame is wasted on updating things that are stable (won’t change during their update). Assuming I know when this happens in my app (which models are stable and which aren’t), is there anything I can do about it? I can temporarily disable the Animation component of the model to get rid of B, but I don’t know of any way to tell unity “don’t skin the mesh this frame, it hasn’t changed”. This wouldn’t be an issue if hardware skinning was supported, but this is strictly software skinning, so precious CPU time is being used.

Has anyone else encountered performance issues like these? Does anyone know of a possible workaround?

2

I accidently found this topic and also the section in the features feedback forum because of an approximate problem:

I experienced a huge performance hit on multiple (animated) characters (40 characters, each 4000 triangles). In my view it is the CPU powered mesh skinning which draws down the performance. This can make any attempt to implement (even small) strategy games a pain, even when reducing the polys.
I’m almost shocked myself to see this. Also it confirms the impression that Unity3d seems to be optimized for small iPhone games only, but not for “real games”, which obviously are beyond the scope of this game engine…