Hey everyone!

I'm working on an animation script for a customizable character but I think my approach is not so great. I hope you can give me some advice.

I have a basic model (a "naked" character) and up to about 7 armor pieces (feet, torso and so on). The armor is placed at the character position and by ent_animatefrom animated the same way as the character (character and armor have the same bones).
This is ok at 16 characters, but with more it starts to consume too much fps.

Is there a way to do it better without shaders (I have the Extra Edition)?

I tried copying the bone angles directly without "animating" the armor, but the speedup was practically nothing.


Another question I have in mind: I've seen basically two different types of bone animations. One with a "connected" skelleton (one bone starts where another ends) and one with a "disconnected" skelleton (bones are distributed over the model and not directly connected). Which one is in which case to prefer? Does this also affect the framerate?

Thank you for your answers!