I’d be interested in this.
my UDK game’s characters are composed of 9 body part meshes + a variable number of cloth and armor (anything from 2 to 10), and they are all using one ParentAnimComponent (same skeleton). when the time comes to make the move to UE4 I’ll most likely implement multiplayer, or at least a much larger amount of AI characters on-screen.
I’m curious as to how this would affect Morph Targetting though. ideally my head meshes will have morph targets but the rest wouldn’t. still if I could merge all meshes excepting the MorphTarget’d mesh it’d be huge.
I also wonder if it’s as good and great as you describe it. on paper you could reduce the drawcall amount… but only if all the meshes use the same materials. a single mesh with 2 different materials already produces 2 draw calls, so how does merging 2 skeletalmeshes with different materials (ie. body and armor) reduce the drawcall amount? all I see is it would reduce the processing time for the skeleton transform, but maybe I’m missing something?