Hi guys,

I’m making a small game where I’d like to animate four cloned characters simultaneously. The mesh is about 3k poly. The problem is that my FPS drops to about 15 instead of 60 as soon as all characters animate at the same time. I’m loading the character as an md5Mesh and the animations as md5 animations.

Some other info: I’m using Smooth skeleton animator and my mesh is exported from 3Ds Max and is rigged using the CAT animation system. Is there a limit to the amount of bones you may use before GPU looses control of the calculations?

Is it unreasonable to animate four characters at the same time? They share the same geometry instance and animation file instances, but are individual meshes. I assume they have to be individual so that they can animate independently of each other?

I’d love to hear what the best approach to do this would be. How do I generally improve performance of md5 animation?

Thanks

How many joints do your models have? How many vertices are bound per joint? These are two very important factors in the performance of skeletal animation playback. Try to keep both of them as low as possible. If you can stay under 20 joints, and limit your binding to 2 joints per vertex, that should yield acceptable performance.

In cases where you can use vertex animation instead of skeletal animation (i.e. when animation sequences are short and simple/monotone) you should try that too, since playback performance is much better for vertex animation (while at the same time it doesn’t scale very well as far as memory usage goes.)