A Handy Method to Optimise Some Animations

While looking for optimisation methods for Nemesis: Showdown and my other Unreal projects, I came across a video a video on YouTube (at the time of writing, I can no longer find the video) that was a guide for creating pickups in unreal. The video showed how to create the blueprint, the mesh and also how to create a custom VFX for the pickup.

All of this was valuable and cool and I don't currently have plans for this style of pickup in N:S, but there was one thing he said in the video that stuck with me, and that was about how to animate the pickup. He wanted it to float up and down in place, and created a timeline in the blueprint, that would animate the object by moving it up and down in place. This is normal, and how I would typically think to implement the motion myself.

However, he explained that simple animations like this can be optimised further. Animating each instance of the pickup via the Timeline node executes the motion on the CPU, but he then explains that by animating the object in the material shader via its World Position Offset, this can instead be handled by the GPU, reducing the stress on the CPU. I'm aware this would probably only be a minor increase in performance, but since animations like this typically loop continuously for the duration the object is in the scene, and there could be numerous instances of these in a game world, the benefits slowly add up.

Again, this is probably a really minor optimisation, however, when finding ways to optimise a big project, every little helps and this is an interesting technique that I believe could come in handy in the future.