Skinned mesh materials lose performance for each skinned mesh

Bug Reports Engine Bugs
#1

Reproduction Steps
skinned mesh color thing.rbxl (37.5 KB)

Select the Part in the workspace. Open the Color3 color picker and slide the nub around. Observe that the color changes instantly to respond to the newly selected color.

Now hit play solo. A script will create 1000 new instances of the skinned mesh. Try changing the color as before and observe a significant performance drop.

Expected Behavior
Only the part that changes color should update appearance.

Actual Behavior
Every part updates appearance when any one of them changes color

Issue Area: Engine
Issue Type: Performance
Impact: High
Frequency: Constantly

1 Like
#2

@Sharksie, thank you for reaching and and reporting the issue.

When placing a skeletal mesh directly into the workspace, it treats the workspace as the root for the skeleton. Which means that all parts added end up being part of the same hierarchy. We are currently investigating different way to handle that.

In order to maintain high performance, we suggest placing parts under models, and not directly parented to the workspace. This will use the model as the root for the skeleton and will reduce the invalidation need and time spent on rebuilding the skeleton.

Happy to answer any additional question

4 Likes
#3

@Sharksie to add to what @V4_Ap3Dud3 mentioned, you can try this in your script in the example place - and you shouldn’t see any performance slowdown:

for i=1,1000 do
local model = Instance.new("Model")
model.Parent= workspace
workspace.Part:Clone().Parent = model
end
4 Likes
#4

Thanks for the quick response! It still strikes me as a bug that changing the color causes any skeleton rebuilding though. This prevents me from doing something like panels that change color to music, for example.

2 Likes
#5

That is a good point and we will take a look at it. Though the functionality of placing skinned meshes in the workspace is something we plan to address soon, we will post in the coming days/weeks about it. So we would still ask to always use models as place holders for skeletal meshes.

Thank you for the additional clarification and calling that out - we will investigate the color change part of the issue and work to resolve it.

Thank you for your patience and support as well!

2 Likes
#6

Hi @Sharksie I am from Avatar team and currently looking into this performance issue. What I have found is that the skeleton is not rebuild when you change the color of the mesh part. Also put the meshpart under a model seems not significantly improve the performance, which makes sense since it is not a skeleton/bone issue. However, I noticed the reason that causes the performance downgrade in play mode is the meshid specified in the meshpart. If you remove that, you will see that changing color is very smooth. I do not know why this is happening and I will try to pass this to the studio team to take a look at.

3 Likes
#7