Unless you are only blending between poses, it's impracticable to use blend shapes to animate walk and idle animations. It's not a point cache system. If your non-playable characters are all bipedal and with different proportions you can use Unity's Humanoid system to share animations between all the non-playable…
The non-player characters will be in the scene doing just one animation loop. Think of them jumping where most of the main body and major limbs will move. not head, hands, fingers, etc, so will save bone count there. I thought about using generic instead of humanoid setup under unity and only using maybe 10 bones per…
I am developing for mobile and to make the game run on lower spec mobiles, I was only going to import bones/rig for the main character. There are other humanoid characters in the scene which do move about and are rigged already in my 3d app but since they wont be controlled in anyway by the player in the game, I just…
In that case it's even easier. If they all use the same bones, and have the same proportions, then just use the same animator controller for all of them.
I think the amount of bones that you could use on mobile isn't as limited as one might fear. We are doing a game that works on desktop and mobile and therefore we made a test if we can use our desktop rig for the mobile version. As we have just a single character on screen, we had roughly 70+ bones in there (every finger,…
You can also help reduce the load on the engine by lowering the number of bones that affect a given vertex. I think it's 3 bones per vertex by default, but you can set it to 2 or maybe 1 if your models are low poly enough.
I was hoping to reduce the bone count cos even if they all have 10 bones, on mobiles 50 bones + 20 bones on main character is not feasible. They can use the same controller but still dont think I can have 70 bones in th scene on say a 2 year old phone.