StickShow

StickShow is a demo project for Unity that shows how to display huge crowds of simple stick-figure characters on screen at the same time, all moving and behaving individually, without slowing down your game or app.

Under the hood, it uses a Unity graphics feature called GPU instancing — specifically a method known as RenderMeshInstanced. In plain terms, instead of treating each stick figure as a separate object that the computer has to manage one by one, it sends a batch of instructions to the graphics card all at once. Each figure can still have its own unique data (like position or movement) thanks to a custom shader, but the rendering work is done in a single efficient pass rather than thousands of individual draws.

The main audience is game developers or technical artists working in Unity who want to learn this performance technique by studying a working example. A practical scenario: you are building a stadium game and want thousands of cheering fans in the stands, or a battle scene with a massive army — situations where rendering each character normally would crater your frame rate. This project demonstrates the pattern so you can adapt it to your own models and data.

The README is intentionally sparse — it is essentially a code sample with a visual demo rather than a tutorial. You are expected to open the Unity project, explore the setup, and learn from how it is constructed. The value is in the implementation itself, not in documentation.