Animation Information

I've tried searching forums and whatnot, and nothing has really helped me understand a few things:

So I've created an animation. It uses a skinned mesh renderer to show the object as it animates.

On the skinned mesh renderer object, what does Quality mean in reference to 1 bone, 2 bones, 4 bones, auto?

Update when offscreen: if an animation starts for an object, then is offscreen, will the animation complete it's current animation, or just completely stop? If it completely stops, is it more of a 'pause' and the update will continue when on-screen?

I guess just general questions about performance too...

Like, I have a 2D bone animation. Is more animations more 'costly' in terms of performance, on some significant scale, or since the whole thing is animating it's just a slight bit more to animate another bone.

Thanks.

 

The Skeletal animation wikipedia page might help as a starting point.

Quality is the maximum number of bones that can affect vertices on your mesh. More bones look better but require more processing. For each mesh, use the minimum number of bones required to prevent any weird, unwanted distortion during animation.


According to the Skinned Mesh Renderer page, if Update When Offscreen is disabled, the mesh isn't updated and the animation isn't updated. I'm pretty sure it's a 'pause.'

Read Modeling Characters for Optimal Performance. It also depends on which animation system you're using. Mecanim is very efficient with multiple, simultaneously-blended animations. Generally speaking, more animations aren't more costly, but more bones are more costly.