Render-Crowd-Of-Animated-Characters

Why we included this project

Rendering a crowd of animated characters is one of those problems that looks easy until you try it, and this repo attacks it the smart way: bake the animation into a texture and let the GPU do the rest. The project bakes skeletal animation data into an animation map, which a vertex shader reads at runtime to move mesh vertices, so you skip the per-frame CPU skinning cost. Combined with GPU instancing, the demo renders 10,000 soldiers in about 20 draw calls, which is the kind of number that makes crowd scenes viable on modest hardware. It works across Unity 5.x through 2023, supports URP and shadows, and includes an AR Foundation example that runs thousands of toy soldiers on an old iPhone 7. Treat it as a reference implementation rather than a drop-in asset: you'll adapt the baker and shaders to your own models and clips, but if you're hitting walls with SkinnedMeshRenderer crowds, the approach and code are worth studying.