Vertices - looking for animation benchmarks

stikkanimate

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to find numbers regarding vertex and vertex transform maximums. I'm an animator on a mobile game project and I'm hoping we can build a general number that myself and other animators aim for so that everyone can have ample resources to create something impressive.

Erikara has been awesome sharing the problems regarding non-bone deform vertices (and to never use them, ever) while suggesting that 600 vertices is a maximum a character should have

however I need to be able to explain in what circumstances this particular number becomes the best case example as a threat to computer resources and when we can go beyond it. For example, the Bones section in Esoteric's documentation explains that a Nexus 4 begins to have difficulty past 2000 bones, but there's no such recommendation or red line to watch for with vertices and vertex transformations.

We currently have characters that are reaching a 1000-vertex count and need to scale things back for future characters but really like how animations currently look. If I were to suggest bumping up character limits to 800 vertices (and perhaps 1500 Vtransforms) for "Superpowered" characters

Is this something that developers here could reasonably recommend to run on phones as old as the Samsung S5 ? We expect to have no more than 10 of these characters rendered at a time, with VFX, background & foreground particles, and UI with PNG FX.

Thank you for your time!

Harald

Unfortunately we cannot provide a magic number of vertices for a certain target device here, as just for the skeleton update and mesh-generation part, it depends on a combination of at least:

the number of bones,
the number of constraints,
the number of vertices,
whether clipping is used,
whether you are using components to modify or follow bone positions in Unity (e.g. via physics),
how much CPU time your gamelogic tasks require.

So I'm afraid you will not get around measuring your described setup on the target device:

stikkanimate đã viết
"10 characters rendered at a time, with VFX, background & foreground particles, and UI with PNG FX".

There you can experiment with a fixed number of bones and constraints that you think your animators typically use and get to the real vertex count where you can achieve the desired fps.

Also be aware that when you are using multiple atlas page textures per skeleton and render order of your attachments causes multiple submeshes to be drawn, things can get problematic on mobile devices in terms of draw calls. So where possible, only a single atlas texture per skeleton should be used.

stikkanimate

I was afraid I didn't have enough of the right info for the question. Thanks a ton for help! That will go a long way to helping us figure out how best to tie it all together.

Have a great day and thanks again Harald!

Harald

You're welcome, sorry I could not offer more precise info. I know it's a bit disappointing, but anyone who claims to know any exact numbers without measurement in the real context will be proven wrong in the end.

Have a great day as well and thanks for getting back to us!