I’m considering an approach for handling modular skeletal meshes and would like some insight on whether it’s a good idea in terms of both performance and workflow.
The idea is to give certain modular components (like clothing meshes) their own morph targets.
These morphs wouldn’t be for large scale deformations, but instead for subtle corrective adjustments.
For example, if a character pose causes a shirt to fold unnaturally or clip in certain ways, a morph target could be applied to restore the mesh to a more natural shape.
Oddly, that thread hasn’t received any responses, which I found surprising — I assumed this workflow would be more common or at least more widely discussed.
So my main questions are:
Does adding morph targets to modular meshes introduce significant overhead, especially when scaled across multiple assets?
Or is the impact negligible if the morphs are only minor adjustments?
Is this a standard/common or recommended workflow in production pipelines?
Or is it generally avoided?
In short, I’m trying to figure out if this is a sensible, scalable technique, or if there are pitfalls I might not be aware of.
Well as for overhead morph targes are low as far as impact goes and has been updated to use handwear rendering, which once had a performance hit. Since vertex movement is the only thing stored then the impact is relatively minor.
The use of morph injectors is very common with in a production pipeline as it allows for unique characters built with in the same framework.
To play with the idea get your hands on Daz Studio and Genesis 9. Daz3d has been using morph injectors for years to create 1000’s of different characters on a single framework.
It’s extra computation - no matter what you do, when you say: “this vertex moves this much because of the animation, now compute how much extra to move it because of the morph” the engine needs to perform extra math on it.
The cost - and if you can afford it - all comes down to the system in use.
No - it’s generally avoided but only because UE4 doesn’t really support both Morph and Animation - particularly on clothing. Once you enable clothing, you loose the morphs.
This could have been altered in later engine versions (than 4.2x which is somewhat stable), but then again later engine versions aren’t a viable product to use, so if you do use it it’s highly unlikely you’ll be able to release a game that performs well enough not to get slaughtered by accurate reviews.
Overall - just make your assets outside of the engine in a DCC where you can directly bake what you need as you need, producing individual meshes for each character’s body.
This way your end product will work no matter what you do or what engine you put the assets in - all for essentially no extra work, since you have to do the work in the first place anyway.