How do skeletal animations fundamentally work? Are their runtimes considerably slower than keyfram animation? I mean, don't the vertex position data have to be "populated"/"generated"/"interpolated" at each render frame?
...I'm doing some basic stress tests.. with an ~2,000 poly model, with 120 keyframes per animation... 5 different characters * 7 animations per character takes about 60 seconds load time...
...and 1 minute is kind of hefty, plus i probably want to push to about 6K poly instead of 2K eventually