Animation/rig memory question for Mobiles

Connecta

Hello!

I'm about to animate/rig in a project that will be made for mobiles/tablets and will have lots of characters on screen at the same time (up to 50-100 units). So I was wondering if anyone of you got any experience with how complicated rigs (nr of joints?) you can do for such a project without it taking too much of memory?

or generally if you have any benchmarks on how much animations/rigs take for mobiles today?

Best Regards,
M

Eric Chadwick

50-100 units is a lot. You'll want to avoid bones for this many characters, on a mobile device. Better to use a vertex shader to move the leg tips around. Besides, they're going to be tiny right?

Connecta

They will be quite small, yes - maybe a shader is smarter:)
How many boned units do you think is manageable for mobilegames?

Eric Chadwick

I'm not sure. The best thing to do is make an ugly prototype and see how well it runs. Don't worry about how it looks, just get a bunch of units on screen and animating in a loop, but crap animation. Put a FPS counter in the UI. Load it on your hardware. Then optimize and repeat.

Mark Dygert

I think Eric is right, iteration is key.

Often you'll find there isn't one answer or one way to do something, but a framework that will help you iterate quickly so you can get to the best possible combination.