Whats the best approach to skinning a character with multiple separate clothing elements?

Glacierfox

Hi. I'm mainly an environment artist but I'm slowly getting into characters. I'm trying to skin a character I've made with the intention of exporting it into Unreal 4. I've actually done this before where the character was quite simple and made up of one single topological element.

 I've got a base body mesh fully skinned and ready to go but I've got a jacket, vest and jeans to skin to it all made separately in Zbrush. What would the approach be to do this correctly? I'm intending to make the clothing items interchangeable with others in Unreal 4 but I'm running into foreseen problems when trying to skin the clothes on top of the base body mesh, most notably; the base mesh and/or the vest always seems to intersect through the upper clothing layers. I've read quite a few posts and actually looked at a few games but I can't fully determine the methods used. 

Would the correct approach be to delete any hidden geometry under the clothing but then of course I'd have a problem when the underlying body or inner vest needs to be seen or switched out.

Cheers for any help.

kanga

The intersecting has to do with how you are weighting the verst to your rig. You should make a rig animation which puts your character at extremes and then adjust vert weights till you have something that works for a range of motion. I have never done a costume switch but I suppose you could switch out different base meshes with costume combos. I hope someone here who is actually doing this can give you a better answer though.

Cheerio

Glacierfox

kanga said:

The intersecting has to do with how you are weighting the verst to your rig. You should make a rig animation which puts your character at extremes and then adjust vert weights till you have something that works for a range of motion. I have never done a costume switch but I suppose you could switch out different base meshes with costume combos. I hope someone here who is actually doing this can give you a better answer though.

Cheerio

Thanks Kanga

That's exactly what I was thinking, the thing is though, I basically went over the clothing items with some what of a preliminary skin-over just to try and spot some problematic areas but I seem to be getting some unavoidable intersections. These lie on the areas over the stomach where, in real life, garments would crease up and the inner vest would be pushed against the outer jacket.

Of course this stuff is all simulated in high-end CG but we don't have that luxury when running real-time haha.

I just read that some people apply an opacity map over the underlying meshes when combined together, so even if there are intersections, they are invisible. This kinda seems like a messy solution to me though...