Animation Editor - Terrible Performance

I've been patiently waiting for performance of the animation editor to get better for several releases. It was promised in the 2017 builds but never happened. Is something you guys are ever going to look at and address?

For me editor performance is more important that any other feature.

If I had to guess the editor suffers from serious memory issues. If I touch a complex animation or explore a complex animator performance tanks and does not improve. This really is unacceptable in a professional tool.

 

Hard to tell what aspect of performance you're having issues with, could you be more specific about your use case? It's highly likely most people aren't seeing your problem.

 

If you think it will help, for sure.

Context...

I've been told by Unity devs as far back as 2017, that this is a well understood and known problem, but continually falls below the priority bar. I find hard to believe and very frustrating.

It's hard to believe because great performance is the most important feature for a pro tool.

It's frustrating because I keep seeing new features from Unity, but editor performance in general, and the animation editor specifically, gets worse or simply stays flat.

Details...

Project / Animation complexity

- I have complex animators, hundreds of states organized across sub-state machines and blend trees
- In addition, my animations are complex, and the characters I'm animating have 50-60 elements total, 10-15 being animated in a clip, with an average tree depth of 3-4

PC

- I'm running on a very powerful Mac Pro tower

Issues

- Timeline scrubbing is extremely slow, with lag of several seconds. My expectation is the timeline scrubbing is instantaneous, it's an essential feature IMHO of a good animation editor.

- Selection, rotation, translation, of specific components is extremely slow, with several seconds of lag to see feedback on the adjustment

- Dragging curves in the curves view is slow and so laggy that I often "drop" the curve or it jumps to an undesired location.

- Animation playback is slow, skips frames and is extremely inconsistent between loops.

Workarounds

- I can restart Unity, leading me to believe it's a memory or zombie process issue

- Sometimes, but not always, I can build a new simple animator for a character and then drop in only the animations I want to work with. This is insanely tedious and seems totally unnecessary, why the heck is the animator (a runtime state machine) getting updated or impacting performance when I'm editing (in design time) the animation? In cases when this also doesn't work, which I cannot consistently repro, I have to restart unity.

Is that helpful?

PS Sorry, I know that's a bit of a rant, and you're just trying to help, which I greatly appreciate.

 

Added feedback tag. I think really this is something I would never encounter (our animator graphs are a simple 2D blend tree and standalone states crossfaded to via code so it never becomes a bottleneck with evaluation).

For timeline, I can't comment - haven't used it yet. Been delaying using it because it just wasn't fleshed out enough for the longest time.

And finally: Animation components (legacy animator) are faster but to cut out a lot of these problems you would probably want to go with playables api and generate your own lean graph. Not so helpful as you'd like things to work as intended but it's clear it's not going to happen.

I figure it'll take a few years to overhaul all this so if I was in your shoes, I would do what I already did: design them out

 

Thanks, appreciated! You're right... I really should go w playable and gen my own graph... 94% sure it's too late for that with Unto The End, but next project, if I'm lucky enough to have one .

 

Unto the end will absolutely take off. It's brilliant looking. I guess you can endure the pain a bit longer

 

Thanks man... very kind of you to say... working hard. No doubt sleep deprivation makes any perf issues harder to swallow, but I'll find a way!

 

And also please fix the lag spikes while playing animations in editor, it keeps freezing every few seconds making it very hard to get the right feel of the animation. The freezing is gone as soon as I re-open Unity, so I guess it has something to do with caching.

 

^ Agreed! People call me crazy when I bring this bug up. I think it only happens on machines that use Unity over years. I have to close the Animation/Animator window in order to move around in the scene

 

I'm not sure if this is the same issue, but I've been encountering a similar performance issue. It only occurs for me in prefab mode. If I drag the prefab out into a scene and animate it there, then performance is great. It's like night and day. Were talking completely and utterly unusable less than a frame a second in prefab mode, and perfectly fine in scene.