Lately, I’ve been working on improving performance. The game had too many bone animations, which really slowed things down. One of the biggest culprits was the large blooming tree.
I rewrote the flower animation using shaders and vertex animation instead of bones—each petal now rotates around its axis via math, not rigging. It runs much faster now and even has fewer vertices!
But then came the pain:
After spending forever on the math, I imported it from Blender to Unity… and everything broke.
Blender uses Z-up, Unity uses Y-up. Local axes flipped. My flower animation exploded. Petals stretched wildly due to bad vertex data. I almost cried 😭
I thought I had finally fixed it… until I ticked “Static” and all the flowers exploded again. Turns out, when you mark something as Static and check "Batching Static", Unity changes the local coordinate system to optimize draw calls—which ruins vertex animation.
Nobody warned me about that! Everyone says "game dev is easy to get into"—but no one mentions this stuff.
Anyway, I unchecked “Batching Static” and the flower animation finally works. Phew.
This small change improved performance a bit. If I can optimize bunny animations and models too, the game could run even better—but for now, I have no idea how. Maybe someday.