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  • Optimizing Animation.Apply Function Calls

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Good day. I'm in the process of optimizing our game and I use the Unity profiler to observe the CPU usage. I observed that the SkeletonAnimation.Update at times create spike.

Since there's no way to deep profile the Android build, I used deep profilin in the editor instead and traced the hierarchy further. It seems the bulk of the executin time can be seen in Animation.Apply()

I was just wondering if there's a way to optimize this part? I'm considering it could be done on my scripts' end for it is possible that I'm not using the skeleton animations efficiently. Thank you very much.

Apply just calls each timeline's apply method. Each apply method does relatively little work, but maybe you have a large number of timelines?

Optimization is usually on a case-by-case basis.

For example, I notice you have a lot of ColorTimelines. If you have full-character animated colors, it may be faster to do that at the material level instead of as animated slot colors in Spine.
If you also know that some timelines aren't doing anything besides keying a pose that's exactly the same as the bind pose/setup pose, you could just remove them, and then add auto-resetting behavior to the code instead.

I've never seen 13 skeletons take 200ms to update though.

This gives me an idea. What if we could write code to detect those redundant timelines at load time? and then just remove them. I mean during production, it's still ideal to not add those redundant timelines in the first place for the sake of the animator's sanity (so the dopesheet is readable and easy to work with).

Pharan escribió

What if we could write code to detect those redundant timelines at load time?

Detecting that a timeline is not useful is the challenge.

I guess the logic could be as naive as we make it. "not useful" could just be timelines whose keys are nothing but the setup pose value.
It would break stuff that the animator did on purpose if they were using complicated overlapping animations and things. But if they weren't doing that, auto-reset is enough.

6 días más tarde

Thanks for the replies. Based on your suggestions, I'll check:

  • Number of timelines used in the skeletons and try to reduce them if possible
  • Check for color tweens done in spine

My artist teammate is the one doing the animations and what I only see is the output prefab and json files, so not sure how they're built in spine. I'll check. Thank you very much. Any additional suggestions are very welcome. 🙂

I notice that the profile above is very different from the profile below.

The one below has SkeletonAnimation.Update at 0.96ms. Seems totally reasonable when profiled and in the editor.
UI and DOTween seem to be eating up most of your cycles there.

The one above has SkeletonAnimation.Update at 226ms, and a bunch of Spine-unrelated things under it.
UIWidget? TextPromptFader? GameObject.Activate? what are these things? Somehow, I think you're hooking these things up to Spine skeletons.

Just from this, I'm suspecting that there's nothing wrong with your animations at all.

Pharan escribió

The one above has SkeletonAnimation.Update at 226ms, and a bunch of Spine-unrelated things under it.
UIWidget? TextPromptFader? GameObject.Activate? what are these things? Somehow, I think you're hooking these things up to Spine skeletons.

Just from this, I'm suspecting that there's nothing wrong with your animations at all.

Those are UI functions that I scripted, and they involve NGUI objects.

I'm considering this possibility as well, so it's kinda frustrating that I can't use deep profile for the device build. I'm just depending on mapping the deep profile when I run the game in the editor, and I happen to see this call to "Apply" function with a considerably high CPU usage. I'll upload a sample spine project for our character. If it's okay, maybe you guys can suggest improvements based on this. Thank you.

Link sent. Thanks!