I use something like Daz studio or blender where you can map clothing and other things directly to the skin mesh, and for the most part, any sort of morphs (bigger belly, smaller butt, thighs etc) are usually pretty good with the clothing.
Now when I export any sort of character I can export the morph targets, which make sense.
Athletic figure vs beer belly sorta figure configurable within the engine real-time, nice.
But the clothing I have to export as static meshes, which are constrained at that given morph target, or again I can export the morph target that is created from the piece of clothing for that body shape at that given time…
Now what I’m trying to understand, and it seems like after some digging (this seems to be the way and it seems insane) is if you have 10 different body morphs, would you need to morph every single pear of gear for that body shop thus creating an exponentially massive amount of work and organization?..
like I think of an mmo with 1000’s of pieces of gear, and simple sliders like hip sizes and bust size could requires so incredibly insane amount of work. Is this REALLY the case?
Morphs can usually be transferred from one item to another in various shapes/forms.
Usually this is done with an arithmetic vertex proximity algorhytm of some sort, which may indeed require clean up.
Some software may do this by assigning the same vertex number as the original file’s nearest vertex, and then just copying the morph over / re-indexing the file after the process is done.
It all depends on the software. Both the quality and the work involved to transfer both weight paint and morph targets.
Now…
Why on earth would clothing have to be static meshes, and how do you suppose a character would be able to animate and move around if that were indeed the case?
perhaps I’m misunderstanding, and I do hope to be as wrong as possible.
if I design a character with different shape keys, say an athletic character and a fairly large one. I have a chest plate male piece that is fitted to that character.
When I export my character from something like a blender I export with morph targets (or shape keys) that allow the character to be those two different shapes I created.
The armor itself, as far as I am aware, has to be exported in those two different instances as well.
I’ve never come across armor or equipment that can be export not as a static mesh.
If you could send me in a direction where I can learn, I’d happily do so.
