Animation Workflow

EnemyCrowd – Animation Tab

The Animation tab controls how crowds play and blend animations. For large-scale battles the Compute Animated Workflow is strongly recommended: it is the fastest, simplest to set up, and scales to thousands of agents.

Recommended: Compute Animated Workflow

• Setup is minimal: Assign your key clips (locomotion, idle, attack, hit, death, block, etc.). No Animator Controller graph is required.

• Performance focus: Animations are sampled in compute and instanced on the GPU, avoiding Animator overhead per agent.

• Best for swarms: Designed for thousands of agents moving and fighting simultaneously.

Limitations

• No IK / bone parenting: You cannot run IK, attach props, or parent runtime GameObjects to bones.

• Why this is okay: In large crowds IK is expensive and often visually noisy.

• Workaround for weapons/props: Author the model with the weapon already in place (one combined mesh or merged skinned mesh). This avoids runtime parenting entirely.

Using Other Workflows (Animator-based)

If you choose the other workflows, you must set up a standard Animator (Controller, states, blend trees, parameters). This is more flexible (IK, prop parenting, complex graphs) but heavier for large crowds.

• Steps: Create/assign an Animator Controller, wire locomotion/attack/hit/death states, and hook parameters the system expects for speed/attacks. Ensure clips are humanoid-compatible if applicable.

• Examples: The demo scenes include simple Animator setups you can copy or reference.

Tips for Large-Scale Battles

• Prefer Compute Animated for anything 100+ agents.

• Keep clip lists tight: only the clips you actually use.

• Avoid runtime prop attachment; bake weapons into the model when possible.

• Test with many agents early to validate performance before adding polish.