That’s good question. I know older games like Mario 64 had all limps separate, so that hey could be parented and animated that way. I’ve tried that with BabylonJS, but even with instances, the parent-child hierarchies make it perform very poorly. In that video the performance does seem to suffer quite a lot when it hits the 1000-2000 entities.
I had a look at this old paper on SkinnedInstancing: http://developer.download.nvidia.com/SDK/10/direct3d/Source/SkinnedInstancing/doc/SkinnedInstancingWhitePaper.pdf
mentioned in this thread: InstancedMesh With Separate Skeleton ??? - Questions & Answers - HTML5 Game Devs Forum
But ended up using secondary attributes instead of filling the matrix with the animation data.
https://playground.babylonjs.com/#57P8Y8#6
You can offload the animating part to the shader as well, but I prefer this easy way of changing animations. In this example I can have 5000 instances with different animations while still hitting 50fps.
With a normal cloned rabbit mesh+skeleton, this is closer to 500-600 for me, but it’s not exactly a fair test as the instance shader is Very simple, so I’ll have to either simplify a shader for the cloned version, or perhaps just recreate it in a node material. That should be straight forward.
Now I just need to figure out how to have different bone rotations on each instance, so for example, an FPS character can bend his spine and look up and down without effecting the actual skeleton/other instances. My guess for now is, that I can send a matrix as an attribute, and then multiply it by the desired bone, if I can somehow ID that bone it is. Since I already send the matrices and indices of the bones, I guess that shouldn’t be an issue, though