I am working on a mobile app that has avatars displayed in little windows. I decided I wanted these avatars animated with idle animations, eye movement, facial expressions,etc.Since these animations will be static I can simply render a video of the animation and use a video texture to display the avatar, or I could create a mask and use 3d models within the app. The specific models I have are 50k+ polys. I’m not sure what the least expensive way to do this would be though. Which do you think would be less expensive on resources and why?
TIA
-Badseed
Are the expressions going to be driven by situations? IE - will the face change to sad by a state/event/trigger that happens when they are defeated, and happy by the same method when they win?
This would require multiple short videos to have to be loaded dynamically rather than a 3D models blend shape being triggered by the state/event/trigger.
50k polygons isn’t terrible - but is not very optimized either for mobile devices.
Good question -
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It’ll be hard to do a video and not crush the memory on a mobile device. 50k polys is fine, polys are cheap, we’re doing close to a million verts a frame in The Walking Dead : March to War. The mask is the real expensive part you have to watch out for, if possible get them placed in your UI camera so you don’t have to do an actual mask/stencil.
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No these will be looped idle animations with blendshapes. If however going with the 3d models is the less expensive option, I might as well make the facial blendshapes dynamic 
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So I did a quick test in the editor animating frames with a sprite renderer, and it took about half a gig of memory.
That doesn’t sound very good — or is it?
I really suck at reading the profiler! 
I would say it’s an indication that this method does indeed use a lot of memory. That is quite a bit of frames though, so it could always be optimized. I’m tempted to try out one of the many assets available that handles video textures on mobile, but I would be disappointed if it simply did the same thing I’ve already done using frames and the animation window.
Anyone have any recommendations for an asset that accomplishes this using less memory?
I might try using a 8192x8192 sprite sheet and see how that performs.
8k textures aren’t supported on most mobile devices.
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Well that rules that option out! Thanks for saving me the trouble
So what happens if the game has 8k textures and the device doesn’t support it? Will it not install correctly or will it not display the textures correctly?
I suppose the next test will have to be using the models in the scene.
