Some questions about the capabilities of Unity

Questions & Answers
1

I was doing some digging in the possibilities to use Unity as a client to render and let the user interact with animations. I have solved a lot of questions myself, but there are still some unanswered:

Can blendshape animation be exported to FBX and imported into Unity? SOLVED: Unity - Manual: Working with blend shapes

Does Unity support sparse blend shapes?

Does Unity support blending the shapes on the GPU? If so, how many shapes?

We use OGRE-like animation blending. Each 3D models has a set of animation clips. Each clip gets a time and a weight. All the active clips are added. Can we import this concept directly into Unity?

Transparent background rendering and capture: The idea is that is must be possible to render without a background (maybe to a separate render target), and then capture the render target so it can be saved as a file (or in our case, send to FFMPEG for video encoding). It seems the asset store already contains a realtime MP4 encoder for NVENC?

Thanks in advance.

2

Does Unity support sparse blend shapes?
I’m an animator and have never heard of this term. Can you provide a definition?

Does Unity support blending the shapes on the GPU? If so, how many shapes?
Yes - I think - This information is readily available. Unity supports the common way morphs/blend shapes are processed, and I believe can be ‘pushed’ to the gpu if they are not already processing on the gpu.

How many is dependent upon the entire scene and the overall load on the gpu, this has to be tested.