Creating Custom Poses

In this section I'll discuss the general principle in regards to creating custom poses without retargeting the entire animation system to your character. There is a performance difference between a straight retarget approach and a Run-Time Retarget approach. A Straight Retarget approach would be more adequate in reality as it would save a significant amount of performance in areas where a lot of NPC's are, this performance hit caps out at roughly 50 characters. Beyond 50 characters animation performance quickly stops becoming a bottleneck as other things will overpower the animation system's hit to the Game-Thread such as draw calls and character movement component. (This may differ in 5.6 as I have not tested it given the new changes they made in regarding moving things off the Game-Thread). Some people may still wish to use Run-Time Retargeting which will have a maximum hit worst case scenario with about 50 characters in the scene of roughly 2.0 ms differences maybe a bit more on my machine this was about a 10-15 frame drop in performance directly linked to Run-Time Retargeting. Under a light workflow the hit was around 4-5 fps. The reason I didn't go with a Retargeted solution in this project is given the fact that it's a publicly available project that requires me to try and offer as much flexibility as possible. This was my main reasoning behind this decision. With that said the next subsection will discuss the process of Retargeting Poses to a Character, and then Retargeting them Back such that during Run-Time Retargeting the poses will accurately represent as closely as possible to the pose that you made for that specific character. This approach allows you to correct hand offsets for that specific character as well as Posture, and Finger issues.