Unity 2D - Animation drops FPS dramatically

1
votes

I created a 2D sprite animation using the 2d animation package and the 2D Ik package. My character is one sprite sheet (PBS file). In the PBS file all the spites (eyes, mouth, etc, - character is basically a square with a face) are arranged and bones are attached. Then I animated the character's idle animation in Unity.

The animation is complex and is a total of 1028 frames (about 17 seconds).

The scene is almost empty otherwise. There are a few sprites with colliders and rigid bodies for simple platforms. There is a background image which is 1024 px. x 1024 px.

In play mode the FPS drops down to around 30 FPS (and under).

I have another scene without the animation but with a HUGE number of assets (for a 2D scene hundreds of sprites and many of them constantly in motion). This scene runs at 210++ FPS consistently.

Why does this one animation kill the FPS? I'm just getting started with creating animation for all the characters. If I add similar animations to NPCs in the scene (enemies) then this thing will probably not function at all.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

enter image description here

2
unity3danimationframe-rate
Open Unity Profiler and see what takes more cpu time during the gameplay. – VisDesign
The profiler show that the animation is taking up most the CPu resourse and second place is vsync – FatMunkey
Can you show us a picture of it? – VisDesign
Added a link of the image for the profiler. BTW, I have been thinking of buying Spine. would that provide better performance? Maybe export the Spine keyframes as a sprite sheet or sprite atlas? – FatMunkey
To me it seems the script is causing it. I dont know maybe the blue color does interfere. – VisDesign

2 Answers

3
votes

For anyone having the same issue, make sure you have Burst and Collections packages installed (via the Package manager), it extremely improves the performance of 2D Animation.

1
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So I spent a couple of days this week and created sprite sheet animations to replace the skeletal animation I made in Unity. As I suspected, the performance is light years ahead. I have MORE animations now and some of them are as long as 270 frames. Yet I consistently see greater than 220 FPS. It's too bad that unity's 2D animattion package is so slow. To accomplish the same animation I was looking for, I ended up rigging and animating my character in Blender 2.8 using Andreas Esau's COA Tool (Cut-Out-Animation Tools) Add-On.

COA Tools is an awesome tool but I wish it could export a rendered sprite sheet to Unity. I ended up exporting each frame as a separate image and using TexturePacker to make the 2048px square sprite sheets I needed. Once I got the sprite Sheets into unity I was able to quickly set up animation clips and test it out.

As I said, the sprite sheets are far and away better than animation created directly in Unity.

If you bothered to read all the comments on my original post, I will say that there are a lot of scripts running and a lot of computation happening. It is there in the profiler for sure. But this was definately not the main culprit for taking down the FPS. It was absolutely the animations.