What is workflow for characters with customizable armor?

[zeOrb]

@vblanco;92557

There are a few ways. I would tell here 3 different systems.

The modular pawn approach: taken by games like MonsterHunter(reverse engineering of the assets told me that). Your character is broken in parts, you have arm parts, chest, head, pants, etc. Exactly the same way UT3 player models worked. In UE4, you go and create several skeletal meshes, and then combine all of them into one of them, for example the chest. There is a function that “syncs” the skeletons of all the parts, so you just call the animations in the chest, for example,and they will play fullbody.

The Socketed approach: kinda works if your armour is rigid. Its simpler to do than full modular pawn, and its how Dota2 does player cosmetics. You have a base mesh, of the character, normally naked or similar, and then attach different meshes into those(for example, in Dota, some characters dont have a head in the base mesh, so they can just swap head meshes by attaching a different head into the head socket)

The textured approach: This is how World of Warcraft worked in some cases , old school as hell, but maiby has some used when compared with Tesselation. You make your entere player mesh have a texture, and when you change the colors or cloth, you go and merge the textures into the texture for the master one. This one could be used alongside teselation, but i really dont reccomend it.

For me, the best approach for organic full body armors, is the modular pawn approach. Its a bit of a pain to create assets for it, as each leg, arm, etc, has to be rigged to the same skeleton and you have to check that you make them right. The socketed approach can be useful for parts like helmets or shoulderpads, where they are more rigid and dont need as much animation as a whole arm.

Thanks for so detailed answer, it very helpful!
I think I will mix modular pawn with socketed approach for max effect