Which of these tree animations would be more performance-friendly?

Hello,

Let's imagine I am animating a tree which has 10 individual leaves which shake up and down in a cycle. Between:

1- Parenting the leaves to the trunk and animating each leaf's pivot point individually, which results in a whole bunch of objects per tree

or

2- Rigging the tree with a basic setup and animating the joints

which would be more efficient in terms of performance?

Thank you

 

A couple thoughts.
I think you are asking which would be more optimized for the engine, but how you worded it (efficient in terms of performance) leaves a little room for interpreting that you might be asking which process would be more efficient for you as the developer to create.
Either way -
I think if you only have 10 leaves and this is going to be a cycle - setting up the bones (#2) is the best option for you and the engine.

Though there is the thought that possibly the animation built in Unity could maybe be smaller (more efficient in terms of performance) - I think the bytes in saving would be negligible unless you have a non-culled forest of these trees all animating at the same time, then maybe there would be some performance increase. But at this point culling the trees would result in better performance increase than using built in Unity animation vs. bone based keyframe animation.
I think.

 

Alright, thank you!