Uploaded November 2022 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
In this Unity tutorial you will learn how to bake animations as a series of "snapshots" of meshes. These snapshots can be taken at a configurable framerate that suits your game.
The concept here is attacking a similar problem as Animation Instancing: blog.unity.com/technology/animation-instancing-instancing-for-skinnedmeshrenderer, but is still handled by the CPU and does not require any "shader magic" to manipulate the vertices.
It also does not reduce the Draw Calls, as Animation Instancing will do. Instead, this approaches the problem by resolving the "CPU Skinning" taking up a lot of CPU time on the main Unity thread to improve FPS.
This can be taken one step further to batch all the meshes into a single draw call per material via Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced(): docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced.html
Strangely, with my initial attempt, the performance was actually worse than what is implemented here. I didn't have time to dive into that and the performance here was "good enough" for my use case.
🔶 ALL THINGS LlamAcademy now available at: https://llamacademy.dev/support including latest tutorials, courses, ways to support, and more! Check it out 🙂
👨💻 Get the FULL FREE PROJECT on GitHub: github.com/llamacademy/baked-animation-meshes
🏷️Save 25% on the ultimate C# IDE: JetBrains Rider with code LLAMACADEMY: jetbrains.com/store/?section=personal&billing=yearly
📚 Resources
🟠 Bake Skinned Mesh Renderer Mesh: docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/SkinnedMeshRenderer.BakeMesh.html
🟠 Graphics Draw Mesh Instanced: docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced.html /
🟠 Animator Play: docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Animator.Play.html
🟠 Animator Update: docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Animator.Update.html
🟠 "Woodsman the Peasant" video that inspired this one: youtube.com/watch?v=DMdncCPpjyE
Some links may be affiliate links, which at no additional cost to you, gives me a small portion of the purchase.
Chapters:
00:00 Problem Statement - SkinnedMeshRenderers at Scale.
01:01 A Solution - Precomputed or "Baked" Animations
02:16 Key Components - AnimatedMeshScriptableObject.cs
02:21 Key Components - AnimatedMesh.cs
02:55 Creating Baked Animations with an Editor Script
03:46 Bake Your Animations!
05:23 Animator Considerations when Baking
06:37 Become a Supporter!
07:03 When is this a viable option, and when is it not?
In this Unity tutorial you will learn how to bake animations as a series of "snapshots" of meshes. These snapshots can be taken at a configurable framerate that suits your game.
The concept here is attacking a similar problem as Animation Instancing: blog.unity.com/technology/animation-instancing-instancing-for-skinnedmeshrenderer, but is still handled by the CPU and does not require any "shader magic" to manipulate the vertices.
It also does not reduce the Draw Calls, as Animation Instancing will do. Instead, this approaches the problem by resolving the "CPU Skinning" taking up a lot of CPU time on the main Unity thread to improve FPS.
This can be taken one step further to batch all the meshes into a single draw call per material via Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced(): docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced.html
Strangely, with my initial attempt, the performance was actually worse than what is implemented here. I didn't have time to dive into that and the performance here was "good enough" for my use case.
🔶 ALL THINGS LlamAcademy now available at: https://llamacademy.dev/support including latest tutorials, courses, ways to support, and more! Check it out 🙂
👨💻 Get the FULL FREE PROJECT on GitHub: github.com/llamacademy/baked-animation-meshes
🏷️Save 25% on the ultimate C# IDE: JetBrains Rider with code LLAMACADEMY: jetbrains.com/store/?section=personal&billing=yearly
📚 Resources
🟠 Bake Skinned Mesh Renderer Mesh: docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/SkinnedMeshRenderer.BakeMesh.html
🟠 Graphics Draw Mesh Instanced: docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Graphics.DrawMeshInstanced.html /
🟠 Animator Play: docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Animator.Play.html
🟠 Animator Update: docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Animator.Update.html
🟠 "Woodsman the Peasant" video that inspired this one: youtube.com/watch?v=DMdncCPpjyE
Some links may be affiliate links, which at no additional cost to you, gives me a small portion of the purchase.
Chapters:
00:00 Problem Statement - SkinnedMeshRenderers at Scale.
01:01 A Solution - Precomputed or "Baked" Animations
02:16 Key Components - AnimatedMeshScriptableObject.cs
02:21 Key Components - AnimatedMesh.cs
02:55 Creating Baked Animations with an Editor Script
03:46 Bake Your Animations!
05:23 Animator Considerations when Baking
06:37 Become a Supporter!
07:03 When is this a viable option, and when is it not?
