Display warnings when animating resources that will generate new textures with every parameter change

[Arnklit]

An artist on our team animated 2D gradients with the animation player for an effect. Godot allows for this and doesn't give any warning.

The artist did report that this caused the gradient inspector to break, but I have not been able to reproduce this, I'll log a bug it I get a repro.

The bigger issue is that I'm not sure it should be possible to animate these properties, or at least there should be a warning about the performance implication. I assume that animating the properties will generate new textures every single frame.

You can also do this with a Noise texture.

I'm not sure what the best solution is to this, which is why I didn't log it as a proposal. My initial thought would be to simply not allow these values to be keyed, but thinking about it, someone might be OK with textures getting generated when animating, they should just be aware of it.

[Calinou]

This should probably be done by adding a PROPERTY_USAGE_EXPENSIVE_TO_ANIMATE usage that properties can opt into using, then the animation editor can show a warning icon next to the track name if this property is animated. (The autokeying icon would also be different next to those properties, so you're warned in advance before adding it as a track.)

The meaning meaning of PROPERTY_USAGE_EXPENSIVE_TO_ANIMATE would vary on a per-property basis though. In other words, the definition of "expensive" could mean 5 ms, 50 ms, 500 ms, or even more on the same CPU.

Regarding the performance of animating a GradientTexture, it's actually quite fast for 1D gradients. They only have 2048 pixels by default, and you can reduce it easily without losing quality in most scenarios. Where it gets slower is for GradientTexture2D, which is 64×64 = 4096 pixels by default already (and with more complex generation code).

[Arnklit]

I believe the artist was using it for a VFX. So I imagine tens or hundreds of these animating at the same time creating new textures every frame would cause issues. I'll try and set up some tests.

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On Thu, 9 Jan 2025, 14:29 Hugo Locurcio, ***@***.***> wrote: This should probably be done by adding a PROPERTY_USAGE_EXPENSIVE_TO_ANIMATE usage that properties can opt into using. Its meaning would vary on a class-to-class basis though (i.e. what is "expensive" here? Is it 5 ms, 50 ms, 500 ms?) — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#11524 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ABFZXK43BH6IQZDRNQYTJRT2J2BWNAVCNFSM6AAAAABU34JVZSVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTCNZYG4ZTANA> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: <godotengine/godot-proposals/repo-discussions/11524/comments/11787304@ github.com>