Mesh Animator - Highly efficient animated crowds. For support, please use email.

Hey everyone! My new asset is available in the asset store! With Mesh Animator you can animate thousands of meshes uniquely with minimal performance impact! Be sure to check out the performance comparison build and documentation pages, and feel free to reply in this thread or email me with any questions you may have. Happy animating!

Asset Store Link
Documentation

Version 2.0 Release

FPS Zombies Comparison

Version 1.5 Release

Basic Conversion Tutorial

Mecanim vs. Mesh Animator Performance

​

Version 2.0
Full GPU instancing and custom shader support
GPU animation texture bake mode
Complete refactor
New documentation!

Version 1.5
Improvements and Changes:
Added support for exposing transforms! Have animated child transforms just like in the original object.
Added support for multiple materials and submeshes!
New support for root motion animations. None, baked, or apply the motion to the transform at runtime.
Added support for the Optimized Game Objects option in the model importer.
No more need for an animation controller for baking, just add your clips and bake!
Baking humanoid rigs should work much, much better, on a wide variety of objects.
Completely re-wrote mesh combining to be more efficient and accurate.
Completely re-wrote crossfading code, increasing performance and reducing garbage allocations.
Adding custom clips can now be done by selecting root assets.
Added an option for skipping the last frame of animation for looping animations.

Fixes:
Greatly reduced garbage collection in mesh frame generation.
Play() method is now case-sensitive.
Phantom bake objects will no longer appear and remain in the scene after baking.
Bounds for meshes while crossfading should now be correct.

 

nice work. The only negative is that it used double the memory. For mobiles that can be an issue. But in most cases it will be fine.

Ill probably purchase soon

Well done

 

Yeah with the example it uses a relatively high-poly mesh so memory usage is definitely higher than a typical mobile character. I cover the reasons why and how to avoid high memory usage in the documentation. You can have a look here: http://jacobschieck.com/projects/meshanimator/documentation/documentation.html#memory

 

"Memory usage is the same whether you are displaying 1 character, or 1000 characters"

but the demo showed the memory increasing with the same mesh cloned.. right?

are you saying if the one mesh is say 5mb then having 1000 would be 1000 x 5?

 

Memory usage increases as more frames of animation are requested and the meshes are created. Once all frames of animation are generated (which can be done on the fly or on instantiation), then the memory required for each clone won't increase, other than what's required for the GameObject and it's Components. Perhaps I could word that a little bit better.

Let's assume a character takes 5MB for all of it's frames of animation, it won't take any more memory to display 1000 of those characters since all the meshes are shared between them.

In the demo if you spawn one character and let it complete all it's animations, it will generate all it's animation meshes, and memory usage will stop increasing. Then spawning more of the same mesh won't increase the memory required from the Mesh Animator for that base mesh.

Does that make sense? I tried to explain it the best I could.

 

yep you explained it perfectly

I think I can get good use out of it.

 

Version 1.0.4 update
Changes:

• Animations can now be baked at any FPS
• Each animation can be individually baked if needed
• Now compatible with post-processed meshes
• More performance improvements

Fixes:

• Fixed Crossfade method not working when calling from Javascript
• Fixed animations not slowing down with slower playback speeds
• Fixed some WrapModes not working as expected and not firing events

 

Can you upload video of performance test in a mobile device ? (with crossfade)

 

Sure! I'll do it as soon as I'm home later today. Performance for crossfading is highly dependent on the number of vertices * number of meshes currently fading, since it has to Lerp all the positions per frame. I've got some major performance updates for crossfading coming in the next update that should greatly improve it's performance.

 

Here's a video I captured of it running on my Galaxy S4. I've submitted a new version to the asset store which has optional threaded crossfading for even better performance.

 

Version 1.0.5 is now live in the asset store with multi-threaded crossfading and significant crossfading performance improvements.

 

Thanks for the recording, seems like a great asset, definitely a buy.

 

this look like i like but how use him in action ?

 

Hey kilik! I'm not sure if I understand what you are asking, what do you mean by use him in action?

 

in game what's it's possible to make for exemple collider and navmesh can be hard to script ? no ? on mobile
it's can do on real time ? Each animation can be individually baked if needed < it's want's say i can shoot one unit l)
working with blendshape < joke
so yes how it's works it's merge skinmesh

 

Must they all play the same animation at the same time or it can be different per character?

 

Yes they can all play different animations at different times, but they all pool their resources together for efficiency.

 

about 500 animals. with realtime avoidance. mesh animated. realtime. webplayer.
Just a technology test. Rotation Lerping is a bit off, and half the fish accidentally transport a few thousand meters to the right (doh, var init val foof), I'll take a look at fixing it maybe.
However this demonstrates the systems efficiency.

This would simply not be possible with regular methods.

 

Looks great! Glad you were able to get everything working!

 

Gg

 

Hey everyone! A Unity 5 version has been added as well as several bug fixes! I've got a lot of more performance enhancements and additional improvements coming in the next release as well!

 

We love your product. simple
Buy this.

You are limited by your imagination, the number of animation blends you want embedded and the amounts of models you might want to share that across..

That might sounds limiting - it is not if you simply apply logic to the things you use it on.

It is already amazing, and it's getting better? awesomer.

Here are some pics where we used it recently in tests.



it also can assist when other loads are high...



Yup that crazy mess is made of fish trails...


and it does a nice job on simple character work.

blinder

 

how many take in space one backed animation please ?

 

I think you mean "How much space does it take to bake in one animation"

http://jacobschieck.com/projects/meshanimator/documentation/documentation.html#memory

"With Mesh Animator, depending on the number of vertices, and number of frames in your animation, it is going to take up more memory than a traditional SkinnedMeshRenderer and Animator. Where you save is on the CPU. Finding a good balance between the two is important. If a character has 5k vertices and 20 animations each a few seconds long, it's not practical to use Mesh Animator."​

The best use of Mesh Animator is with low-poly models with short animations. Each frame of animation is generated and copied from the base, this is why so much memory is needed for larger meshes and longer animations.

A 4k triangle character (like in the example) takes up 500KB of memory. So to display a 1 second idle animation baked at 30fps, you would need approximately 15MB of memory. Memory usage is the same whether you are displaying 1 character, or 1000 characters. A character that has only 400 triangles takes 32KB of memory per mesh. So the same length animation would only take 960KB of memory. You can use this information to plan accordingly in your projects.


Please note that these are the exact details from the previous versions docs, and may need updating. hope it helps

 

In regards to disk space, it depends on the length of the animation and how many vertices the mesh has. So it's hard to estimate that. If you go off of raw data the formula would be (number of vertices * number of frames * 12) bytes for uncompressed animation. Multiplying by 12 since each float would be 4 bytes and a Vector3 is 3 floats. I've been experimenting with several compression algorithms to make that much smaller, but haven't found anything to get a small size and is fast enough to use at runtime on a large scale yet. It's still on my list of things to implement.

 

MeshAnimationCreator.CreateSnapshots () (at Assets/MeshAnimator/Editor/MeshAnimationCreator.cs:195)
MeshAnimationCreator.OnGUI () (at Assets/MeshAnimator/Editor/MeshAnimationCreator.cs:166)

I do what now when that happens?

ModelImporter importer = (ModelImporter)AssetImporter.GetAtPath(s);



Seems valid? or am I being stupid, again.

 

Getting a "Cannot Cast" exception...
I seem to think this is vaguely familiar but...

any clues?

I fired a copy to your email...

 

Hi jschieck, I found there is no weapon on the mesh animator,but the original FBX model has it.Why?

 

The example model has 2 separate meshes, one for the body and one for the weapon, separately skinned. If you wanted to have the weapon you'd have to bake it separately then sync the 2 mesh animators.

 

You mean I should bake the weapon with it's animation alone, and sync the 2 mesh animators? But there have not skele information on the player's mesh animators,how to sync them?

 

Well I re-looked at the example and I forgot the weapon is not part of the SkinnedMeshRenderer. Ideally you'd either skin it to the skeleton, or use the following script.

This script will attach any object to a face on the mesh animated object. It's relatively quick, and should give you what you need to attach a weapon or any other object to a mesh animator. It will also be included in the next release of MA.

NOTE: In the current version of MA you must change the variable "currentFrame" in MeshAnimator.cs to public for this script to work. This change is also made in the next release of MA.

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. using UnityEngine;
3. using System.Collections;
4.  
5. [ExecuteInEditMode]
6. public class AttachObjectToFace : MonoBehaviour
7. {
8.     public MeshAnimator meshAnimator;
9.     public int faceIndex;
10.     public Vector3 offset;
11.     public Vector3 rotationOffset;
12.  
13.     public bool drawFaceDebugInfo = false;
14.     public Color debugColor = Color.black;
15.  
16.     private Transform mTransform;
17.     private Transform mMeshAnimatorTransform;
18.     private int[] triangles;
19.     private Vector3[] vertices;
20.  
21.     void Awake()
22.     {
23.         mTransform = transform;
24.         if (meshAnimator)
25.         {
26.             mMeshAnimatorTransform = meshAnimator.transform;
27.             triangles = meshAnimator.GetComponent<MeshFilter>().sharedMesh.triangles;
28.             vertices = meshAnimator.GetComponent<MeshFilter>().sharedMesh.vertices;
29.         }
30.     }
31.     void LateUpdate()
32.     {
33.         if (meshAnimator)
34.         {
35.             if (!mMeshAnimatorTransform)
36.                 mMeshAnimatorTransform = meshAnimator.transform;
37.             if (triangles.Length == 0)
38.             {
39.                 triangles = meshAnimator.GetComponent<MeshFilter>().sharedMesh.triangles;
40.                 vertices = meshAnimator.GetComponent<MeshFilter>().sharedMesh.vertices;
41.             }
42.  
43.             faceIndex = Mathf.Clamp(faceIndex, 0, triangles.Length);
44.             Vector3 v1, v2, v3;
45.             if (Application.isPlaying == false || !meshAnimator || !meshAnimator.currentAnimation)
46.             {
47.                 v1 = vertices[triangles[faceIndex + 0]];
48.                 v2 = vertices[triangles[faceIndex + 1]];
49.                 v3 = vertices[triangles[faceIndex + 2]];
50.             }
51.             else
52.             {
53.                 v1 = meshAnimator.currentAnimation.GetFrame(meshAnimator.currentFrame)[triangles[faceIndex + 0]];
54.                 v2 = meshAnimator.currentAnimation.GetFrame(meshAnimator.currentFrame)[triangles[faceIndex + 1]];
55.                 v3 = meshAnimator.currentAnimation.GetFrame(meshAnimator.currentFrame)[triangles[faceIndex + 2]];
56.             }
57.             Vector3 faceCenter = Vector3.zero;
58.  
59.             faceCenter += v1;
60.             faceCenter += v2;
61.             faceCenter += v3;
62.             faceCenter /= 3;
63.  
64.             Vector3 vec1 = v1 - v2;
65.             Vector3 vec2 = v1 - v3;
66.             Vector3 n = Vector3.Cross(vec1, vec2);
67.             n.Normalize();
68.             Quaternion rot = Quaternion.identity;
69.             if (n != Vector3.zero)
70.                 rot = Quaternion.LookRotation(n);
71.             mTransform.position = mMeshAnimatorTransform.TransformPoint(faceCenter) + (rot * offset);
72.             mTransform.rotation = rot;
73.             mTransform.Rotate(rotationOffset);
74.         }
75.     }
76. #if UNITY_EDITOR
77.     void OnDrawGizmos()
78.     {
79.         if (drawFaceDebugInfo && meshAnimator)
80.         {
81.             GUIStyle style = new GUIStyle(GUI.skin.label);
82.             style.fontStyle = FontStyle.Bold;
83.             style.normal.textColor = debugColor;
84.             int[] tris = meshAnimator.GetComponent<MeshFilter>().sharedMesh.triangles;
85.             Vector3[] verts = meshAnimator.GetComponent<MeshFilter>().sharedMesh.vertices;
86.             for (int i = 0; i < tris.Length; i += 3)
87.             {
88.                 Vector3 v1 = meshAnimator.transform.TransformPoint(verts[tris[i + 0]]);
89.                 Vector3 v2 = meshAnimator.transform.TransformPoint(verts[tris[i + 1]]);
90.                 Vector3 v3 = meshAnimator.transform.TransformPoint(verts[tris[i + 2]]);
91.  
92.                 Vector3 faceCenter = Vector3.zero;
93.  
94.                 faceCenter += v1;
95.                 faceCenter += v2;
96.                 faceCenter += v3;
97.                 faceCenter /= 3;
98.  
99.                 UnityEditor.Handles.Label(faceCenter, i.ToString(), style);
100.                 if (i == faceIndex)
101.                 {
102.                     Gizmos.color = debugColor;
103.                     Gizmos.DrawLine(v1, v2);
104.                     Gizmos.DrawLine(v2, v3);
105.                     Gizmos.DrawLine(v1, v3);
106.                 }
107.             }
108.         }
109.     }
110. #endif
111. }
112.  

 

It's perfect! Thank you.

 

For future Reference, You may want to tell people who have bought this to not use it on Mecanim animations in your project. As it turns them all to legacy animations and F*&$ up all the Animator settings... Im not mad, but just took the wind out of my sails for working on my project this weekend...

 

Hey. Sorry I didn't mention that anywhere in the docs. In the newest version I'll be submitting to the store this week, re-importing of assets is no longer needed, so it won't break your settings anymore.

 

Hi Jacob
So I have a character but im using animations from another character in mecanim. Is there a way to still bake these other Animations into my current character with mesh animator? If I Use original FBX model only the animations that come with it appear, and if I use a prefab it shows the extra animations but gives this error when I try to generate a snapshot.

InvalidCastException: Cannot cast from source type to destination type.
MeshAnimationCreator.CreateSnapshots () (at Assets/MeshAnimator/Editor/MeshAnimationCreator.cs:195)
MeshAnimationCreator.OnGUI () (at Assets/MeshAnimator/Editor/MeshAnimationCreator.cs:166)
System.Reflection.MonoMethod.Invoke (System.Object obj, BindingFlags invokeAttr, System.Reflection.Binder binder, System.Object[] parameters, System.Globalization.CultureInfo culture) (at /Users/builduser/buildslave/mono-runtime-and-classlibs/build/mcs/class/corlib/System.Reflection/MonoMethod.cs:222)

My End goal is that I will be using 3-4 Lod levels and hopefully with the lower Lods use mesh Animator Animations and the Closer LOD use Mecanim. End Goal is to have 50 -100 Low Poly Animated characters on a mobile platform.

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks

 

Yes this is possible with the latest version. You can specify custom animation clips to be baked on whatever prefab or source FBX you want. I've PMed you a link to latest version in the meantime while it awaits approval in the asset store.

 

awesome man thanks I'll check it out this evening

 

Hello friend I intend to buy this soon.. But just to confirm;
Are you able to use humanoid-animated models that use animations from other fbx models?
If so I assume it does not use the mecanim interface? Instead it would work like this asset;
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/15156

Please let me know soon, we intend to use humanoid-animated models.
Many thanks!

 

Hi jschieck
your plugin is awesome and i plan to buy it, but before that could i take up your a bit time to ask a question?
Does MeshAnimator keep skeleton child? Our game is a Action game, and the enemy in game have to find the appointed skeleton position to fire a bullet particle when he attack.
Did you have any advice for this case? Thanks

 

Hey everyone! I've very excited to announce that version 1.2.0 is finally here! I've implemented a new compression that allows for much finer control and tuning from loss-less compression all the way down to voxelization. Here's a look!

Accuracy = 0.001. Good for most animations. Use 0.0001 for even less compression.

Accuracy = 0.1. A very low accuracy can be used to create animated models that look pixelated.



Also included is the AttachToFace script which allows you to attach objects to any face on your character.



Here's the change log along with some additional notes and a tutorial video:

Changelog:
OLD BAKED ANIMATION WILL NO LONGER PLAY
New features:
New compression algorithm, allowing for much smaller animation sizes, and the creation of voxelized characters.
Added the ability to add custom clips to bake.
Added an AttachObjectToFace for attaching an object to a specific mesh face.

Changes:
Baking should be much, much faster now, and work with any GameObject and not just FBX files.
Lots of bug fixes.

Here's a quick video showing how the get the above results for voxelized characters.

 

Sorry for the late reply, for some reason I never got a notification about it. The answer is yes, you can use other animations, but you need to bake each one separately. So even though they share the same source animation, each one would generate it's own MeshAnimation once baked.

 

No it does not keep the skeleton. What you can do though is use the AttachToFace script and attach an empty GameObject to the mesh where you would like to the bullet to hit.

 

Awesome. Going to be actually trying to use this asset in my game soon i hope. Looking forward to testing this version out.

 

Thx for your reply! Maybe the AttachToFace script could solve our project problem, i'll try it.

 

lastAssetName A string I added to the function

blah blah

Code (CSharp):

1.  PrefabUtility.CreatePrefab(assetFolder + asset.name + ".prefab", asset, ReplacePrefabOptions.ReplaceNameBased);
2. lastAssetName = asset.name;

blah blah

Code (CSharp):

1.  EditorUtility.DisplayDialog("Mesh Animator", string.Format
2.     ("Baked "
3.       + assetFolder
4.       + lastAssetName
5.       + ".prefab {0} animation{1} successfully!",
6.   clips.Count,
7.   clips.Count > 1 ? "s" : string.Empty),
8. "OK");

Helpful.

(I had no idea )

EDIT: And yep I read the docs... Just didn't seem to find it the first time I did it HAH

 

Quick point. How do I constrain root motion?

I checked in the anim import settings and they appear to be constrained?




I appear to be getting Z movement it in my resultant mesh but not in the preview window, nor when I use that animation unbaked.



Any clues ?

 

I am pretty sure I have root motion disabled now in



and the pose is correct I believe, with baked x/z



perhaps it is silently not overwriting previous efforts?
I will clear it down.

 

so I tried another model...

He became very mangled and his presence stretched out long into floating point error oblivion in a cyclical way.



Hmmmmm.

Less Compression did not help



Custom Clip problem maybe? The clip is valid and works prior to conversion..

 

Interesting... I understand what's going on, but it's kind of hard to diagnose without a copy of the model so I can really take a look at it. Could you send both the guy and the girl to me in a PM or email it to me? I'll take a look at it right away and get back to you with a fix for it.

 

on it.

files sent