What about when it is culled by the built in Blitz camera culling routine (ie. behind the camera).
I know it keeps *track* of what frame an animation is on, but does Blitz actually perform bone->vertex transforms if an entity is hidden?
Going back to a post made a long time ago in beginners, I'm pretty sure it did. People were complaining at how slow Blitz was and I seem to recall it was because they weren't stopping animating objects that they were hiding. I know I requested a feature addition to disable the entity so that it no longer animated and was hidden at the same time, as I thought that would make more sense, particularly for beginners. Mark said that it sounded like somethiing that would be worth adding at some stage, so I guess that would count as confirmation that hidden entities are animated unless you stop them.
But as I say, this is a few versions back at least.. so it might have changed.
Doing some timetesting is probably the best way to find out.
Try hiding a group of animating entities, and then the same group of entities with animations stopped, and see if there's a significant difference in the time taken.