Hello everybody,

I have programmed a mobile game in Unity, in which some low poly ships are visible simultaneously (10+ Ships). The performance is good, but I would like to reduce the number of meshes and materials for even better performance. Until now I have always animated the ships in Unity and separated towers, planes and other moving parts from the mesh. But now i would like to join the mesh completely in Blender and then animate it without bones/rigging, so that the performance in Unity is not affected by all the bones.

I have researched and understood/tested/learned this so far:

- Blend Shapes/Shape Keys can't help in my case, because they only perform a morph movement from point A to point B but not more complex animations. Also, there is no way to keep the volume of a complex object during rotation.

- the NLA editor can combine actions and you don't have to reanimate the same animation a thousand times but can apply it to several objects via the NLA editor, but complex animations only work with bones/rigging.

- i could rig the ships but this is quite a lot of work for 50+ ships and would not necessarily be good for performance, also the mesh should not overlap and this is the case with all my ships

Am i right?

So my question is: Is it possible to have a completely joined mesh, but still animate single towers, airplanes, gates etc.? And if so, how?

Thanks for your help/time!

of course, with simple translations and rotations after selecting the polygons you want to animate. it doesn't matter whether you use bones with rigging or not, they are meant to be a helper anyway. the more complicated the model is, the more arises the need to rig to get a better result.