Should model be detached into parts when skinning?

outer

Just wondering, should I have detached my model into separate objects for skinning? Or have I just made things needlessly more difficult?

Ive split it up into head, helmet, body, l/r hand, l/r legs etc as seen below. This is all new to me so just wondering what the standard operation procedure here is.

sabillano

I would say that you COULD have it separated. It is your choice.

If it separated just remember to had the skinning to all the pieces at the same time. You can Paste Instanced later if you forgot.
And take care with the seamed vertices they should have the same weight, if they don't there could be holes when animating.

monster

I would only detach if the model will have swappable or removable parts. Other it's better for performance (GPU skinning) if they are one mesh. The game engine you use might combine them on import.

outer

Ah so have the body as one object, then attachments like the helmet, backpack an ammo pouches/grenades as separate objects? That makes sense thinking about it. Yeah your right aswell, I can simply parent those to the mesh in unity - though for the time being Ill just have them as separate objects on the mesh skinned with max weight.

Cheers man.

[edit]

sabillano wrote: »

I would say that you COULD have it separated. It is your choice.

If it separated just remember to had the skinning to all the pieces at the same time. You can Paste Instanced later if you forgot.
And take care with the seamed vertices they should have the same weight, if they don't there could be holes when animating.

What the?! How did this comment get posted ahead of the one before it? Could you elaborate a bit when you say the model will have holes when animated - holes dosnt sound good.

SlyRipper

What he means is, that if you let's say use this character for several stuff in your game or whatever, then you might change the model to get more customizations, like replacing the vest with another one, or change weapon, gloves, shoes, whatever.. In that case you'll want to do seperate parts, that way you can easily change them in the game but keep the animations (all parts must be linked correct to the bones. Also in this case you'll get overlapping vertices, like the ones from head and the neck if you seperate them for a different character look. You need to link the vertices that overlap on that section to have the same weights on the bone, if you link them to other bones or use different weights then you get holes in your model, because it's stretches in different ways. So to make the vertices follow the same way and don't have holes you need to give them the same settings.

If you don't need to change parts on the model it's easier and faster to rigg/skin it as one mesh, also saves some drawcalls in the game later.

P.S. sorry for my bad english, hope you could at least understand a little bit of it