[Poll] What's faster in performance? Animation or Scripting

Say you have a door you want to rotate, you can either...

Play a rotation animation or set the transform.rotation directly

What's faster and why?

 

Define "faster".
- faster to write it once?
- faster to tweak when needed?
- faster as in runs faster on the device?

 

Faster as in performance on the device, animations take longer to setup and make changes to.

 

In a case of a simple open the door, probably the simple animation is the best choice, then your own script and lastly the animator.
And this is because the animation probably optimized enough to handle simple animations, your code will do the same eventually if you put enough work in it. Animator is a beast, it does not really worth the resources just for a simple door animation.
But this is just a gut feeling, if you want to know exactly, build it and measure it. Never accept less than the hard data.

 

Using the Unity Profiler provides you with the ability to measure what's faster. Here are a few resources that should help you to get started with the Unity Profiler.

Learn how to diagnose common performance problems and optimize your projects:
https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/performance-optimization

Spoiler: Introduction to the Profiler - Unity Official Tutorials

Spoiler: Unite Europe 2017 - Practical guide to profiling tools in Unity

Spoiler: Unite Seoul 2018 - When optimization goes wrong