Animation/rig memory question for Mobiles

Connecta · May 2015

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 · May 2015

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 · May 2015

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

Eric Chadwick · May 2015

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 · May 2015

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.

Animation/rig memory question for Mobiles

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