This is as much of a question as it is a philosophy discussion in game design best practices.
I have a skeletal mesh that I would like to swap hands, feet, and other assets out as needed. Basically, the character has been broken into sub-meshes. The method I am familiar with is exporting the entire skeleton with only the desired mesh assets attached. However, I feel like this is wasted resources since there’s a whole extra invisible skeleton for the unneeded bits. Can I just attach the parts that I need?
The pro to doing it as mentioned above, is it’s really easy to sync animations across all sub-meshes using the same skeleton. If I were to swap say a hand for a gloved hand as a separate skeletal mesh component, I’d need to attach the hand to the bone or socket in question and also align animations – right?
What do you think is the best way?
What methods have you tried?