Overhead of animation of inactive objects

It seems like all the objects with animation in the current scene are played over and over again. But, if I keep the object inactive, would the overhead still persist?
I'm using Unity's animator to animate. I don't want them to basically not just 'not draw', I want the whole calculation for animation to stop when they come to rest position, and only start again with user event

 

Which are you using: Animation Legacy Components or Animator Controller etc?

Both have ways to cull themselves... with varying degrees of success.

 

I'm using the animator to animate. By culling do you only mean not drawing in the screen? I don't want them to basically not just 'not draw', I want the whole calculation for animation to stop when they come to rest position, and only start again with user event.

 

It should be possible. I stopped using Animator Controllers for a lot of reasons. One of them was their always 'animating' overhead, but it's the least of their problems, for me.

There should be a way to put the state machine open, in its window, whilst running, and play the game until the Animator controlled object is way offscreen and should be culled, and check to see if the state is looping in that Animator state window.

Good luck with Animator. It's a ... _expletive_

 

I checked out that the animator actually stopped playing when setActive is set to false. But, it that enough to confirm it? I mean, if there was a way to verify it programmatically in the update() function, it would be ideal. Do you know which variable or method lets us query that state(that if an animation is playing)?

 

If you're doing this for performance reasons, use the profiler to see what the difference is with and without Active set