A Simple Trick That Save Some Anim Performance In UE4

Introduction

The optimization is about the animation node Blendlist_Base, which means all blend list nodes(eg. Blend Pose By Bool, Blend Pose By Enum and Blend Pose By Integer) can benefit from this optimization.

Blend Poses

Performance Waste

The key point of this optimization is, in most of the times, only one branch would be evaluated for a blendlist.

Evaluated Branch

But in FAnimNode_BlendListBase::Evaluate_AnyThread, a FAnimationRuntime::BlendPosesTogether function would be called even only one branch is evaluated.

for (int32 i = 0; i < PosesToEvaluate.Num(); ++i)
{
	int32 PoseIndex = PosesToEvaluate[i];

	FPoseContext EvaluateContext(Output);

	FPoseLink& CurrentPose = BlendPose[PoseIndex];
	CurrentPose.Evaluate(EvaluateContext);

	FilteredPoses[i].MoveBonesFrom(EvaluateContext.Pose);
	FilteredCurve[i].MoveFrom(EvaluateContext.Curve);
}

// Use the calculated blend sample data if we're blending per-bone
if (BlendProfile)
{
	FAnimationRuntime::BlendPosesTogetherPerBone(FilteredPoses, FilteredCurve, BlendProfile, PerBoneSampleData, PosesToEvaluate, Output.Pose, Output.Curve);
}
else
{
	FAnimationRuntime::BlendPosesTogether(FilteredPoses, FilteredCurve, BlendWeights, PosesToEvaluate, Output.Pose, Output.Curve);
}