I have a character that uses morph targets to change the appearance; skinny, muscular, etc. I come from Unity, and I use Megafiers Morph/Wrap to have the clothing automatically resize based on the characters’ mesh. So I have the base mesh with morphs, clothing that fits the base mesh without skinning(weighting), and when I move the morph sliders the clothing automatically re-scales.
What would be a practical solution to do something similar in UE4? Do I have to skin and create morph targets for each piece of clothing?
Is there a practical reason you want to do your player models this way?
There are a couple of reasons you would want to go this way, one being the need for procedural NPC’s, but taking into consideration that all player models can use the same rig and blueprints it’s rather redundant.
As for direction the ideal would be not to think in terms of making clothing fit a given player model but rather what can be added as a target that will allow clothing to be composite onto as many different player models as possible.
First bullet point is morphs are not an absolute but rather can take shape based on a percentage value and other shapes can be applied as an additive value to the current shape.
Taking your example we will assume that your muscular model is bigger and has longer arms so to make a coat fit and is usable for other models you need two targets.
a target with longer sleeves
a target with more volume
Since you can set a morph as a percentage the jacket will fit most if not any other player model that has longer arms or more volume as referenced by you base model.
Two reasons; one which you pointed out, having the ability to randomize NPCs (both body shapes and clothing). Two, allowing the playing to customize the look of their avatar. I want to use the same rig to make it easy to re-target animations. I wasn’t planning on having different limb lengths at this point, just a scale slider to determine height, all proportional.
My main issue was to figure out the best solution for for tighter fitting clothing, such as a shirt for example. Let’s say you go from a flat stomach to a beer belly for instance, would I need to set up morph targets on the shirt, or is there an easier solution…
As a direct approach yes this is the way you would need to do it as far as the procedural approach would go but the total number of targets required would be based on the total number of variations you would need to fit to any given player model.
The thing to keep in mind, as I mentioned, is a target is additive so any “plus” value needed has to be added based on the base model else there is no point of adding procedural variations. The flip side though is each variation you add compounds the total number of shapes that you can make available as to fit to finish.