Question Making tank and turret as single skinned mesh, or multiple meshes?

Hi.

I think is my first post in this animation sub forum.

I do wonder, while I investigate unity.animation packages and its samples
https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Unity.Animation.Samples
I do wonder, what would be most perform ant way to do tank, tracks and turret animations.

On one hand, having tank wheels, tracks and turret with cannon as single mesh. Then do animation blending for targeting, tracks movements and wheels.

On other hand, I am considering using multiple meshes per tank, turret and canon as separate. Probably body and wheels and tracks as single mesh. But also considering making the individual meshes. That using bones of course for attachments.

So for attachments of each part, I could use sockets, as one of unity.animation samples shows.

The tanks is just an example, but consider something more sophisticated. Like retractors / hinges / piston and turret on top.

And of course, I need muzle position, to fire projectiles. Which shouldn't be an issue, since having bones position accessible anyway.

And finally, considering multiplying these tanks by 10k.
I think there is one sample with close to 100-1k characters. But performance is not that grate I think. Sure, they got much more bones to be calculated, than I need.

I would like do run stress test eventually, but while I am getting familiar with unity.animation and brain storming, I thought is worth to ask here.

 

single tank should see the socket sample,its just set the parent and child relationship.but its hard to show 10k+...

 

Initial thoughts are that as soon as you want to start rendering thousands of simple animated things, you probably want to take the texture animation route that's been posted about a few times on the DOTs forum.