Performance

Lumina is fast for an animation engine — it is not magic, and it is honest about where time goes. Video rendering is bounded by per-frame rasterization plus FFmpeg encoding, not by the timeline math (scene-graph evaluation of a 2000-object scene is sub-millisecond).

Benchmarks

Run them yourself:

cargo bench -p lumina-bench

The suite covers:

  • timeline_eval — Timeline::get_state_at on synthetic 100 / 1000 / 2000-object scenes.
  • render_frame — a single Skia frame at 1080p.
  • easing_dispatch — overhead of the easing lookup (incl. cubic_bezier).

Record the numbers from your hardware in your fork's README rather than quoting someone else's machine.

Honest expectations

ScenarioRealistic expectation
Headless 1080p60 renderseconds-to-minutes depending on object count + duration
FFmpeg encodea few seconds on top of rendering
Browser playback (WASM, CPU)60 fps for simple scenes; fewer for heavy ones
Interactive HTMLno video encode → near-instant

Export currently renders frames on a single thread and streams them to FFmpeg; frame-parallel export (frames are independent) is planned for v0.5 — see planning/ROADMAP.md.

Tips

  • Group static sub-trees so transforms apply once.
  • Keep shadow and SVG rasterization opt-in; both are cached/bounded but cost more than flat fills.
  • For previews, use --watch (renders a single mid-point frame) instead of full MP4 exports.