Zugalu Entertainment’s medieval city-builder Thrive: Heavy Lies the Crown posed a formidable performance challenge: animating hundreds—or even thousands—of distinct characters simultaneously on modest hardware. Targeting 60 fps on a GTX 750 Ti and a quad-core CPU, the team discovered that traditional vertex-baked animations were consuming up to 20 GB of RAM and causing crashes. Lead concept artist Jackie Li and CTO Garrett Hau therefore engineered a custom animation-baking pipeline that offloaded compute to the GPU while dramatically reducing memory usage.
By migrating from vertex baking to bone baking—storing only per-frame bone transforms in compact texture maps that could be shared across characters with identical rigs—the team slashed RAM requirements from 20 GB to just 500 MB. Leveraging Unity’s SkinnedMeshRenderer APIs, Shader Graph for matrix math, and GPU instancing, they cut character draw calls from around 1,000 to just 20 and shrank animation compute time from 3.5 ms on a GTX 750 Ti to under 0.35 ms on a 2080 Ti. To dive deeper into their workflow and performance metrics, read the full case study on Unity’s website.