GPU Animation and Vertex Animation

[w2moon]

What problem does this solve or what need does it fill?

To achieve a battlefield effect with tens of thousands of soldiers fighting, similar to Warhammer 3.

Bevy is an ECS game engine that can naturally support hundreds of thousands of entities, but when it comes to 3D skeletal animations, it only supports a few thousand. If GPU animation is supported, it could simultaneously handle tens of thousands of skeletal animations.

What solution would you like?

To achieve functionality similar to that of https://github.com/piti6/UnityGpuInstancedAnimation and https://github.com/mkrebser/GPUInstance, https://github.com/antzGames/Godot_Vertex_Animation_Textures_Plugin

[pcwalton]

The way you would do this is to have a compute shader that can update the skin joints instead of having the CPU do it. Don't try to do it the way the Unity and Godot plugins you linked do it, with data encoded into textures and no compute; that way has been obsolete for about 15 years now.

Also note that we can't do this by default, because animations must be able to affect game/physics logic. It has to be an opt-in thing.