Simple Unreal Engine animation tricks 

“Many players abandon games with inconsistent framerates, yet many developers overlook animation as a major performance bottleneck. What if you could boost your Unreal Engine 5.6 game’s performance without sacrificing visual quality?”

In today’s hyper-competitive gaming market, players expect silky-smooth performance across all devices. With character animations often consuming significant CPU resources, optimizing your animation systems can deliver substantial performance gains – especially in scenes with multiple characters.

As Epic’s documentation notes: “Animation is one of the most common performance bottlenecks in Unreal Engine projects with many active characters.”

From my experience, implementing these techniques across multiple UE projects, these seven optimization strategies deliver the biggest performance wins with minimal implementation effort:
1. Enable Update Rate Optimization (URO) – this single checkbox can reduce animation update frequency for distant characters while maintaining visual quality for nearby ones.
2. Move Blueprint logic to Thread-Safe Functions – shifting code from sequential Event Graphs to parallel AnimGraph nodes can dramatically reduce Game Thread bottlenecks.
3. Use Fixed Skeletal Bounds – for non-physics characters, this setting eliminates expensive per-frame bounds calculations.
4. Leverage Animation Budget Allocator – this built-in plugin automatically manages update rates based on character importance and screen presence.
5. Component-ize Complex Logic – replace heavy Blueprint operations with lightweight C++ or optimized Function Libraries. Try to move as much animation logic as possible to UAnimInstance (high-level animation logic) and UAnimInstanceProxy (low-level, thread-safe operations) for better data binding.
6. Use bindings for property access.
7. Use animation fast path for processing – animation Blueprint is not designed for calculations of any sort!

For immediate impact:
• Enable URO on all skeletal meshes
• Replace standard SkeletalMeshComponents with BudgetedSkeletalMeshComponents
• Use Thread-safe functions, Bindings for property access, and Fast Paths as much as possible
• Move heavy Event Graph logic to AnimGraph nodes and further to UAnimInstance + UAnimInstanceProxy
• Use the console command “DisplayDebug UpdateRateOptimizations” to visualize benefits