How scaleable is the humanoid rig?

I really like unity's humanoid system for mecanim, primarily because of the animation retargeting. I can make use of it to easily create humanoids of many shapes and sizes without needing to constantly make new armatures.

But i'm wondering how efficient it is on a larger scale. For a possible future project, i'd like to use it to animate small armies. Maybe up to 400 actors onscreen at once. All with extremely low polycounts (500-3000 at highest LOD) and small textures, of course. And there'd be lots of duplication amongst them so perhaps batching could help too. And i'm sure LOD meshes would help farther, but still its a lot. it seems to me that mecanim might be the performance bottleneck in such a situation.

any ideas on how things hold up for large crowds?

 

Just try it out and use the profiler to see what the actual bottleneck is in you actual use case. I was surprised to see how scalable it can be. In my case I used three different kinds of characters with their own animations and duplicated them lots of times and got better performance than expected.

 

"just try it out" is great advice for some situations, but this particular case i'm asking speculatively about a future project, i already have two others in the works and i certainly won't be starting another just yet. It's a lot less time and effort to write this thread asking, than it is to go and try to test all that myself

 

There are many unknowns in your vague description. This only allows some vague answer. And as this is about the performance of a certain project, the best advice is always to try it out, especially if it is as simple as your case. Take a character, create some LODs for it and then create many instances of it in the scene and check how well it works. This simple test that doesn't take long to create, gives you far more information than any answer in any forum.