Hey there !
I’d like to know what I should use and how to animate my windmill.
There will be a lot of those windmill located on the roofs, so I need the less laggy and I want it to run it smoothly.
I would use CFrame but I think theres another option that uses less cpu/gpu power.
I also don’t know how to rotate the fans depending on the rotor’s axis, and not world axis.
I know roblox’s animation editor should work for non-NPC models.
Whether it contains some special optimizations to make things faster, I dont know (it might run the animation directly on the clients instead of replicating each and every (weld) cframe change).
So you could try that.
I remember long time ago, welds wouldnt update their visual position if the body was anchored/grounded, not sure if that has been fixed (you should check this), or if it affects roblox animations.
If its just a single spinning blade, a single Motor6D should be able to animate it programmatically, which might be best, assuming it works at all.
CFraming each moving part separately will probably be slowest, so I would avoid doing that unless necessary (and its only necessary if roblox didnt fix the welds-on-anchored-bodies bug). If it IS necessary, it should be fully clientside (shouldnt be a problem for your blades). Maybe with some range/camera direction based quality reduction (like dont animate stuff behind the camera)
Last, because animating single parts rotating at high speeds will look bad unless they go somewhat slow, also consider just using a flat circle with an animated decal on it (so its just a big blur with fuzzy details that kinda slowly shift around over time) - even if you decide to also animate the blades when they happen to go slow (if they spin up/down sometimes).
Just use one of the new hinges and the in-built motor/servo to rotate it.
Note: I’m unsure how performance-intensive this would be for many parts though. I’d give it a try at least.
Looking cool! Just remember that Motor6D’s run locally so don’t use them if it’s important that the object is synced with the server, and they don’t use physics. But that’s what makes them perfect for animations like this!