[RELEASED] GPU Instancer - Crowd Animations

Hello again,
I have a situation where all my sub-objects of prototypes get unparented after calling AddPrefabInstance on the CrowdManager.

My setup is:
- ROOT

- MESH
- Root_Bone

- bone (21 bones hierarchy)​

- object with logic

- object with logic child 1 (2, 3 etc)​

After doing AddPrefabInstance
The hierarchy in the scene gets flattened, even for the "object with logic" children. Meaning it's now:
-ROOT

- MESH
- Root_bone
- bone child 1
- bone child 2
- object with logic
- object with logic child 1
- etc
​

All at the same level as "mesh".
I've tried debugging etc, I can't see where this unparenting is happening.
If I DONT use "sync bones". None of the bones are in the hierarchy, but the rest is still flatened.

The model is setup with the "optimize gameobjects" option to OFF.
I tried a prototype that was setup as a variant of the original fbx model. And a prototype with a original prefab created from the base model after doing "unpack" on the model.

Could really use some help with this one, I've been bashing my head against it for a couple of days.

EDIT:
I've add some success with the following setup:
NEW ROOT

MODEL ROOT (keep link)

Bone root

bone 1 ,etc

Attachement weapon​

Object with logic
Colliders
Etc

The bone hierarchy still gets flattened (only the ones with attachments show up)
But the weapon attached now doesn't get flattened. Neither does anything "outside" the model root.

Would still appreciate a pointer on what is happening here? In the demo for attachment, the whole bone hierarchy is there also. (which I don't mind, but would be nice that GPUInstancer affect only specific objects/ bones and not the whole hierarchy :/ )

 

Hi there,
Crowd Animator requires to flatten the hierarchy by design so the transforms can be processed individually, used in suitable data structures in the GPU and modified in threads. So unfortunately there is not an option to keep the hierarchy.

 

please check support email

 

Hi, we've been considering integrating this plugin to our project. Our project is heavily based on the animator but the performance gain that we obtain using crowd animator are impressive enough to justify refactoring our codebase. One thing that I feel is missing is to have the equivalent of the OnAnimatorMove callback. We need to have root motion informations without the plugin updating transforms automatically. I can see where and how the plugin handle root motion and update transforms in a job. Any suggestion on how we could get position / rotation delta inside a MonoBehaviour?
I've been able to hack my way by passing additional native arrays to the root motion jobs and preventing the job to change the transform access array but it's super messy and I'd rather have an official way of doing it

 

Hi there,
If you need to calculate the position / rotation change from the previous frame, you can store the information and calculate the difference in a MonoBehaviour.
Crowd Animator does not have a built-in way of doing it because it would slow things down to add callbacks or make additional calculations and store additional data.

 

Hello, I'd like to know which is faster in these hypothetical scenarios:

40,000 instances, each one with 300 triangles
8,000 instances, each one with 1,500 triangles

Basically, what's the tradeoff between having many low-poly instances, and few high-poly instances? Which is more of a drain on performance - poly count, or instance count?

 

I would say.
8k instances is better.
You will have your mesh stored on a gpu so only transformations are going to be sent.

 

Hi there,
Usually having higher instance count with lower triangles is better with GPU instancing rendering performance. But as @koirat mentioned, if you are making transform updates every frame, it might cause a bottleneck because of higher data transfer to GPU.

 

Hello,
Any plans on supporting Vulkan on PC ?
The asset store page shows that it should support Vulkan for Android. Figured I'd try, but I'm getting errors when trying to use it on Windows.

 

I'm trying to expose some transforms on my prefab. I tried with only one or two, but the following test contains all of them. I'm using crowd animator.

Only one is ever exposed - rest are missing (deleted). Why does it happen? I can't find anything in the documentation.





Also, I'm getting some nasty deformations like here which do not happen in original animations. Is there any way to prevent that?

 

Hi there,
We did not see any issues using Vulkan on PC during our tests. Can you please make a detailed bug report following this guide so we can investigate.

 

Hi Sir,
I have a question. Can I get value isfrustum of player when player inside camera or outside? I checked Use Frustum Culling is enable.