Hi all. I'm still in beginning stages & I'm having a difficulty understanding game characters and clothing. The first thing is it seems that game characters are modeled so that hey have no "flesh" under their clothes. Is this the way I should do it? What if I want my character to have multiple outfits with ability to change? Multiple outfits = multiple versions of my model with said outfits then?
Another thing is animating something like a trench coat for games. What would be the animation method that would export to a game engine (Unity/UDK?). I want to ultimately make something of a fighting game with one of these popular engines, but maybe a fighting game where you can also go and walk around in a 3d world, so some little bit of cloth movement would be nice.
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The problem with having a body underneath the clothing is that you can experience a lot of clipping, ie the body clipping through the clothing so it's visible. It'll also end up as unnecessary detail that you can't see. So planning ahead and being smart with your designs is pretty important.
I say take a good look at something like Guild Wars 2 for cool customizable armors and such. Doing that for a fighting-game would be trickier since the animations need to frickin slick. Very rare to see fighting games do that without it looking wonky.
I'm still confused as to how it works. Like if the game engine will need various models of my character already in the outfits or if it just needs one nude model that can alternate between outfits. In Street Fighter IV for example when Ryu is shirtless I dunno whether his shirted self has any skin under the clothes. That would mean there are multiple Ryu models.
I guess for this sort of thing the best way to understand is to actually do it.
Interesting approach, do you bind mesh to bones and skin them accordingly with a single rig on a base mesh?
acitone: We're on a heavily-modified Unreal3 build.
Yuze: Yeah, that's pretty much spot on. There's a single rig, morphable base meshes (body types for player and clothing items), as well as PHAT bones where applicable.