Awesome - thanks for clarifying Mitch, and sorry for the confusion
Definitely see the memory pressure go away with the instantiate-as-mecanim option, but also seeing some of the performance gains from using baked mecanim go with them - which I think makes sense since we're now relying on spine's runtime to actually do the animation instead of the "rasterized" animation clips.
Am I right that this is roughly the state of things for Unity rendering/import options? Just trying to get a feel for our options.
Spine Export Formats - 2 Options Available
JSON - Default export format. Readability/interoperability is nice, easy to integrate with. Wire size and processing speed may make this a less attractive choice for complex rigs or rigs with many skins or animations.
Binary - This trades a smaller wire size and faster parse speed for interoperability and is generally preferable for a rig of moderate or greater complexity.
Unity Rendering Options - 3 Options Available
SkeletonAnimation - This is the recommended rendering option for Spine in Unity and is the most mature target at this point.
Mecanim/SkeletonAnimator - This is for folks who require more advanced blending tools and state modeling than what Spine offers, The tradeoff is some amount of functionality. Since the Spine runtime is still actually powering the animations, this solution offers no greater performance than SkeletonAnimation and may indeed actually be slower in certain circumstances.
Mecanim with Baked Animations - This is targeted generally towards sharing and essentially "rasterizes" the animation. This creates an AnimationController and a series of Animation Clips that can run independently of the spine runtime. The result is a series of Animations that are generally largely in memory and wire size but are generally capable of running significantly faster. This means this MAY be an appropriate solution for a spine animation that is somewhat basic but will be instantiated many times - for instance a monster that may have 50-100 copies on screen at once
